we now know that De rerum natura was the principal Latin influence on the greatest of Roman poets, Virgil, in emulation in his Georgics and refutation in The Aeneid--it's hard to overstate how radically prescient and threatening the philosophy that underlies it is. [Stephen] Greenblatt does a marvellous job of showing how, through the millennia, admirers of Lucretius, from Cicero to Poggio to his first English translator, Lucy Hutchinson, went to great lengths to gloss their enthusiasm for the poem as an aesthetic object with an incredulity towards its philosophical message. Even today, readers of this column may well find what Lucretius thinks "offensive." He's the only ancient poet whose ideas are still radical.from Michael Lista: National Post: On Poetry: The poet of our age
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