The Erotics of Materialism

This book studies the legacy of Lucretian poetics in Renaissance and early modern vernacular poetry. It emphasizes the seductions of Lucretian poetry because Lucretian thinking on erotics and on poetry occupies the same theoretical terrain, so that accounts of the former illuminate Lucretian thinking on the latter. This book focuses on a less appreciated section of De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), the end of Book 4. It shows that Lucretius's description of erotic fantasy and obsession in Book 4 is central to De rerum natura's wide-ranging discussion of poetics and the imagination, as well as to the reception of those ideas in early modernity--