Lucretius: The Personality of the Poet

Extract

In 1883 M. Patin published his Études sur la poésie latine, and devoted his seventh chapter (pp. 117 ff.) to Lucretius under the heading ‘Du poëme De la Nature. L'anti-Lucrèce chez Lucrèce’. His theme was that behind Lucretius' poetry one can detect a deeply divided personality, a man dedicated indeed to the doctrines of Epicurus, but revealing in his language and imagery a naturally religious spirit chafing, perhaps unconsciously, against the constraints of his philosophy. On reading this chapter one becomes aware of a certain apologetic undertone. M. Patin is preoccupied with justifying his almost excessive enthusiasm for a pagan poet to a Christian audience. Two of the pitfalls confronting the literary critic are that he will identify himself in his own imagination with the author whom he is criticizing, and that he will be so identified by his readers. In his eagerness to avoid the second M. Patin slips into the first; for all its brilliance, his chapter illuminates the personality of its writer rather than of Lucretius, and might almost be entitled ‘L'anti-Patin chez Patin’. Yet his chapter, and especially his chapter-heading, have set the tone for much subsequent criticism of Lucretius. Taking up his main thesis, critics have arbitrarily broadened its terms of reference, drawing attention to such apparent inconsistencies as the contrast between the picture of Mars and Venus as lovers and as open to be moved by prayers for suffering humanity (i. 29 ff.), and the picture of the gods living a life of untroubled contemplation in the interstellar spaces, remote from our world and uninterested in its affairs (iii. 18 ff.). And the tensions and contradictions of the poem have been linked by some with the story of the poet's madness and suicide.