American Journal of Philology

This reworking of a 2015 Berkeley thesis puts the spotlight on the response, by a number of French and English Renaissance poets writing between the 1550s and the 1670s, to the fusion of erotics and poetics in Lucretius' De Rerum Natura: in France, Pierre de Ronsard and his associate in the Pléiade, Remy Belleau; in England, John Donne and two female writers, Lucy Hutchinson and Margaret Cavendish. In the "Introduction," Hock identifies as Lucretius' central strategy of persuasion a poetics of seduction. Whatever other purposes the opening hymn to Venus may have, it establishes erotic desire as that which the poem instils in its readers: the lepos "charm" that ensnares all living creatures to follow Venus in the business of procreation is, as universally recognised, the same as the aeternus lepos that the poet asks the goddess to lend his own words. Hock reads back into the relationship between poem and reader the "eternal wound of love" that disarms Mars in the presence of Venus, in the ensuing prayer for peace. The honeyed cup simile is also read as an image of seduction (true, the tenor for which it is the vehicle is the musaeus lepos with which Lucretius touches that of which he sings, 1.934). Perhaps surprisingly, nothing is made of the amor musarum which impels the poet to roam over his trackless ways (1.924–5).

But more surprising for many will be the claim that the notoriously vivid description of the frustrations of sexual desire at the end of book 4 "is central to DRN's wide-ranging discussion of poetics and the imagination, as well as to the reception of those ideas in early modernity" (5). Where most readers find a disturbing disjunction between the procreative and pacific Venus of the opening hymn, and the psychologically destructive Venus of erotic delusion in book 4, Hock sees the two as part of the same nexus of erotics and poetics. Of recurrent importance for Hock's readings throughout the book are the atomic simulacra of the object of desire, the fine films of matter which both provoke desire, as material things, and frustrate its fulfilment by their insubstantiality. Much is made of Foucault's paradoxical phrase "incorporeal materiality" with reference to simulacra, a phrase extended by Jonathan Goldberg to atoms themselves, as being matter that cannot be directly apprehended by the senses. But this is to obscure the absolute division in Epicurean between matter (atoms) and non-matter (the void). Invisibility does not verge on incorporeality. The claimed "here-not-here" quality of both simulacra and atoms is mobilized for the reading of a materialist poetics into the passage on desire at the end of book 4, via the analogy that [End Page 181] "Just as images stoke desire for bodies, Lucretian poetry stokes desire for the atom itself, or rather, for materialist teachings about the atom" (15; I am not sure that this is a desire that I recognise in myself). The impossibility of sensory apprehension of the atoms is important also for a recurrent identification of a Lucretian "scepticism" in the early modern reception. simulacrum et imago may be Lucretius' necessary route to knowledge of the atoms, but this most dogmatic of philosophical poets is no sceptic. I was puzzled to see myself quoted (twice: 181 n. 18, 210 n. 31) as ascribing "a rhetoric of uncertainty" to Lucretius' didactic voice, until I checked and found that what I had in fact written was "a rhetoric of certainty." More productive is the enlistment of simulacra for a thesis about the materiality of fantasy and of poetry, convergent with the analogy, merging into identity, between atoms and the letters of the poem, in the pun on elementa. This ontological identity of representations and things, undermining the Platonic hierarchy of reality and imitation, is later put to good use in tracing the collision between Renaissance Neoplatonism and Lucretian poetics.

Chapter 1, "Materializing...