Lucretius : (1) (c.99-55 BC), Latin poet & philosopher whose De Rerum Natura sets arguments based on philosophies of Democritus & Epicurus. (2) Central figure in Tennyson’s Luctretius (1868).
... supreme, his vision, like Dante's, always stretches to the stars." 1 Two other poets whose vision, literally and metaphorically, stretches to the stars are Lucretius and Sri Aurobindo. In Book I of De Rerum Natura Lucretius promises to reveal the ultimate realities of heaven and the gods. Applauding this attempt of his Virgil, in his Georgics, identifies him as the poet "who hath availed... objections to the geocentric closed world of the Aristotelians, Lucretius waxes lyrical about the infinity of the universe. The existing universe is bounded in none of its dimensions; for then it must have an outside. There can be an outside of nothing, 5 Quoted in T. James Luce, ed. Ancient Writers: Greece and Rome, Vol. II, Lucretius to Ammianus Marcellinus, New York : Charles Scribner's Sons... allay the fear of death. But towards the end of it Lucretius is seen to revel in the description of the destruction caused by death. Savitri celebrated a human being's conquest over death. Savitri's encounter with death is presented as a fierce fight between Love and Death. The God of Death is viewed almost as a philosopher of the type of Lucretius, advocating all that is negative and wrong: ...
... epic of the spirit. The De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) of Virgil's contemporary Lucretius is materialistic philosophy turned into poetry. If Savitri is the poetry of the science of Spirit, De Rerum Natura is the poetry of the science of Matter. The world of Lucretius is the world of atoms moving through space impelled by the very dynamism inherent in them and building... That things have their poetry, not because of what we make them symbols of, but because of their own movement and life, is what Lucretius proves once for all to mankind." 8 Sri Aurobindo proves that Spirit — the mystical consciousness — too has its poetry . "He (Lucretius) sees the whole universe," continues the philosopher-critic, "spread out in its true movement and proportions; he sees mankind... world both in and out and feels the bliss of conscious creation; Lucretius sees only the out, and that too without its bliss, except only when sometimes he sees Venus (Empedocles's Love; Nature's creative enlivening activity) prevailing over Mars (Empedocles's Strife, Nature's disintegrating disheartening movement). From Lucretius to Dante the transition is from naturalism to supematuralism ...
... of that dark Supreme, poets like Hardy and Lucretius create their masterpieces and disclose in spite of themselves the real origin of inspiration. It is also significant that even atheists like them break forth on occasion into chants about living forces more than human, one divine Spirit or many divine or at least supernatural presences. Thus Lucretius at his most inspired hails as all-fostering... believed, is immaterial. All that was necessary for art was that they should be conscious of an overwhelming urge to fashion a piece of utter and unsurpassable beauty. We have actually in Lucretius a poet who was an atheist and yet embodied the godlike presence which makes poetry the revelation that it is. Such a paradox is possible because inspiration is from beyond the machinery of logic and... his philosophical epic like a religion manque, even as the presence of ari "unweeting" power, absolute and endless in "crass casualty", is perceived in the world of Thomas Hardy. The atheisms of Lucretius and Hardy are really special forms, heroic or morbid according to temperament, of the mystical belief all ages have had in an utter Unknown that rules above the desires and imaginings of men the totality ...
... spiritual view we have taken of the poetic process. We may be told: "All fine poets do not offer us spiritual matter. They speak of all sorts of earthly things and some of them are even disbelievers. Lucretius, the great Roman poet, scoffed at religion, and said that the gods were created by human fear: he was a materialist and atheist by intellectual persuasion." This is quite true but what it means... expression. All that it says comes with the faultless face and gait of a godhead. How even materialism and atheism could come like this is well suggested by a phrase of Elizabeth Browning about Lucretius. She writes in a poem that he "denied divinely the Divine". This intrinsic divineness should provide us with a safe passage everywhere in the world of poetry and also steady us against any wavering... think out reality nor to dissect phenomena but to experience the play of light and shadow, fixity and flux, individual form and multiple pattern: the poet may have a philosophic or a scientific bent (Lucretius had both), but he must exercise it in a glory of sight, set forth everything with intimate image, evocative symbol. The ancient Indian word for poet is Kavi, which means one who sees and reveals ...
... of assertive individuality. The chief names usually listed in Graeco-Roman Classicism are Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil and Lucretius. These six, all things considered, are indeed greater than the brilliant sextet: Pindar, Simonides, Sappho, Horace, Catullus, Ovid. There need be no quarrel on this score... brilliance of quick pathos. Virgil is most chiselled, most euphonious, a blend of elegance and majesty, exhibiting a charming strength, a dignified sensitivity. Lucretius comes in rushing force and grandeur winged with philosophical imaginativeness. Classicism has a later phase which continues the Graeco-Roman spirit of poetic... thought to bear upon the cosmos, Milton post-Renaissance Puritan thought to survey the uni-verse. Their ancestor, as it were, in Graeco-Roman Classicism is Lucretius of De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), but there is no theology there, rather the very opposite, an anti-religious thought based on the theories of Democritus ...
... we should not lay ourselves open to the objection: "All fine poets do not offer us spiritual matter. They talk of a multitude of earthly things and some of them are even disbelievers. The Roman Lucretius scoffed at religion and said that the gods were created by human fear: he was a materialist and atheist by intellectual persuasion." It is true that a lot of excellent poetry is ostensibly unconcerned... subject, comes with the face and gait of a godhead. How even materialism and atheism could come like this is well hit off by a paradoxical turn of Page 202 Elizabeth Browning's about Lucretius: she writes in a poem that he "denied divinely the Divine". It is the intrinsic divineness of the intuition-packed creative style of poetry that is the soul's note in it. And it is because... think out reality nor to dissect phenomena but to experience the play of light and shadow, fixity and flux, individual form and multiple pattern: the poet may have a philosophic or a scientific bent (Lucretius had both), but he must exercise it in a glory of sight, set forth everything with intimate image, evocative symbol or at least general suggestive figurativeness. To make a broad resume in Sri ...
... we should not lay ourselves open to the objection: "All fine poets do not offer us spiritual matter. They talk of a multitude of earthly things and some of them are even disbelievers. The Roman Lucretius scoffed at religion and said that the gods were created by human fear: he was materialist and atheist by intellectual persuasion." It is true that a lot of excellent poetry is ostensibly unconcerned... poetry, whatever its subject, comes with the face and gait of a godhead. How even materialism and atheism could come like this is well hit off by a paradoxical turn of Elizabeth Browning's about Lucretius: she writes in a poem that he "denied divinely the Divine". It is the intrinsic divineness of the intuition-packed creative style of poetry that is the soul's note in it. And it is because... out reality nor to dissect phenomena but to experience the play of light and shadow, fixity and flux, individual form and multiple pattern: the poet may have a philosophic or a scientific bent (Lucretius had both), but he must exercise it in a glory of sight, set forth everything with intimate image, evocative symbol or at least general suggestive figurativeness. To make a broad résumé in ...
... we should not lay ourselves open to the objection: "All fine poets do not offer us spiritual matter. They talk of a multitude of earthly things and some of them are even disbelievers. The Roman Lucretius scoffed at religion and said that the gods were created by human fear: he was materialist and atheist by intellectual persuasion." It is true that a lot of excellent poetry is ostensibly unconcerned... poetry, whatever its subject, comes with the face and gait of a godhead. How even materialism and atheism could come like this is well hit off by a paradoxical turn of Elizabeth Browning's about Lucretius: she writes in a poem that he "denied divinely the Divine." It is the intrinsic divineness of the intuition-packed creative style of poetry that is the soul's note in it. And it is because... out reality nor to dissect phenomena but to experience the play of light and shadow, fixity and flux, individual form and multiple pattern: the poet may have a philosophic or a scientific bent (Lucretius had both), but he must exercise it in a glory of sight, set forth everything with intimate image, evocative symbol or at least general suggestive figurativeness. To make a broad resume in ...
... still farther from the source, they are much nearer to the earth and are suffused with the smell and effluvia of this vale of tears. Among the ancients, strictly speaking, the later classical Lucretius was a remarkable phenomenon. By nature he was a poet, but his mental interest lay in metaphysical speculation, in philosophy, and unpoetical business. He turned away from arms and heroes, wrath... ing, delving into the mystery, the why and the how and the whither of it all. He chose a dangerous subject for his poetic inspiration and yet it cannot be said that his attempt was a failure. Lucretius was not a religious or spiritual poet; he was rather Marxian,— atheistic, materialistic. The dialectical materialism of today could find in him a lot of nourishment and support. But whatever the... times bordering on the suprasensual. It was a high light, a force of consciousness that at its highest pitch had the ring and vibration of something almost spiritual. For the basic principle of Lucretius' inspiration is a large thought-force, a tense perception, a taut nervous reaction—it is not, of course, the identity in being with the inner realities which is the hallmark of a spiritual conciousness ...
... still farther from the source, they are much nearer to the earth and are suffused with the smell and effluvia of this vale of tears. Among the ancients, strictly speaking, the later classical Lucretius was a remarkable phenomenon. By nature he was a poet, but his mental interest lay in metaphysical speculation, in philosophy, and unpoetical business. He turned away from arms and heroes, wrath and... philosophising, delving 'into the mystery, the why and the how and the whither of it all. He chose a dangerous subject for his poetic inspiration and yet it cannot be said that his attempt was a failure. Lucretius was not a religious or spiritual poet; he was rather Marxian, – atheistic, materialistic. The dialectical materialism of today could find in him a lot of nourishment and support. But whatever the... at times bordering on the suprasensual. It was a high light, a force of consciousness that at its highest pitch had the ring and vibration of something almost spiritual. For the basic principle of Lucretius' inspiration is a large thought-force, a tense perception, a taut nervous reaction– it is not, of course, the identity in being with the inner realities which is the hallmark of a spiritual consciousness ...
... spirit to our life. Can we say all that about Lucretius, the Latin poet? He promises to reveal the ultimate realities of heaven and of the gods. But the promise is a materialist's promise. In contrast to that Sri Aurobindo's Savitri has "the twin task of knowing the causes of things and laying all fears of Fate and roar of Death under his feet." Lucretius waxes lyrically about the universe when ...
... if that turn is present in a sceptic or an atheist he can still by means of the artistic conscience create great verse. Did not Elizabeth Browning refer to the Roman poet Lucretius as denying divinely the Divine? Sometimes Lucretius is indeed stupendous, as in those phrases where he describes Page 120 the philosopher Epicurus, of whom he was a disciple, triumphing over the crude sup ...
... poetry through the keen artistic conscience in him and feel as if immortal presences were moving from one perfect poise to another in his verse. Did not Elizabeth Browning refer to the Roman poet Lucretius as denying divinely the Divine? Marking how adaptable to the genuine poet's tirelessly corrective passion for perfection in his work is that faith of Hamlet - There's a divinity... breathe of God with every syllable properly significant, we shall serve ill whatever deity there may be unless we have the art to make our words winged. It is by his artistic instinct that Lucretius the scoffer and materialist could raise his verse to rare heights. Stupendous indeed on occasion is the godlike movement of his Latin lines. Take those phrases where he describes the philosopher Epicurus ...
... a great Yogi and certainly received his inspiration from Krishna. Catullus and Horace You prefer Catullus [ to Horace ] because he was a philosopher? You have certainly rolled Lucretius here into Catullus—Lucretius who wrote an epic about the "Nature of Things" and invested the Epicurean philosophy with a rudely Roman and most unepicurean majesty and grandeur. Catullus had no more philosophy in ...
... following quotation. See also 'Q' Art of Writing (Guild Books), p. 33. 94. Selected Essays., pp. 258,271. Writing of Lucretius' De Return Natura and its basis on the materialistic philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus, Santayana writes: "Suppose.... Lucretius is quite wrong in his science...His poem would then lose its pertinence to our lives and personal convictions; it would not lose ...
... use for some to Page 24 contend that Virgil is a tame and elegant writer of a wearisome work in verse on agriculture and a tedious pseudo-epic written to imperial order and Lucretius the only really great poet in Latin literature or to depreciate Milton for his Latin English and inflated style and the largely uninteresting character of his two epics; the world either refuses... language of intuitive inspiration, illumination or the higher thinking and feeling. A very rich or great poetry may then emerge and many of the most powerful passages in Shakespeare, Virgil or Lucretius or the Mahabharata and Ramayana, not to speak of the Gita, the Upanishads or the Rig Veda, have this inspiration. It is a poetry "thick inlaid with patines of bright gold" or welling up in a stream ...
... Gaius Valerius Catullus (87-54? BC). Roman poet and epigrammatist. Page 340 Next Horace. You prefer Catullus because he was a philosopher? You have certainly rolled Lucretius 1 here into Catullus—Lucretius who wrote an epic about the "Nature of Things" and invested the Epicurean philosophy with a rudely Roman and most unepicurean majesty and grandeur. Catullus had no more philosophy ...
... Another marked influence on him was scientism, more specifically the mentality of the nineteenth century reconditioned by the mind of Bertrand Russell, who wrote: “My view of religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. … Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover ...
... seen first by a few then by many , then by all. At first there see he adverse critics and assailants, but these negative voice die away. Questionings may rise from time to time— e.g. as to whether Lucretius was not a greater poet than Virgil—but these are usually from individuals and the general verdict abides always. Even lesser poets retain their rank in its of fluctuations of their fame. You speak ...
... What do they mean by "philosophy" in a poem? Of course if one sets out to write a metaphysical argument or treatise Page 125 in verse like the Greek Empedocles 1 or the Roman Lucretius 2 it is a risky business and is likely to land you into prosaic poetry which is a less pardonable mixture than poetic prose' And also one has to be very careful, when philosophising in a less perilous ...
... fear." * "What does your correspondent mean by #'philosophy' in a poem? Of course if one sets out to write a metaphysical argument in verse like the Greek Empedocles or the Roman Lucretius it is a risky business and is likely to land you into prosaic poetry which is a less pardonable mixture than poetic prose. Even when philosophising in a less perilous way, one has to be careful not ...
... fuller language of intuitive inspiration, illumination or the higher thinking and feeling. A very rich or great poetry may then emerge and many of the most powerful passages in Shakespeare, Virgil or Lucretius or the Mahabharata and Ramayana, not to speak of the Gita, the Upanishads or the 1 In Savitri Sri Aurobindo has brought in Vyasa's line thus: some lone tremendous ...
... oceanic sweep of Homer pulsed through Milton's arteries, the broad even river-flow of Virgil ran in his veins, the concentrated titanism of Aeschylus made his bone and marrow, the grandiose passion of Lucretius tensed his tissues, the sweetly intense severity of Dante thrilled and toned his nerves - and, in addition to these formative forces, Page 57 there were the diverse poetic qualities ...
... philosophy differs from intellectual and that he will touch on the diverse branches of the former. Homer certainly does not start a train of imaginative argument on life's why and whence and whither, as Lucretius often does, Dante in several places, Milton not seldom, Goethe at times, Shelley on occasion, Wordsworth repeatedly, Lascelles Abercrombie in a notable measure, Hardy to a certain extent, Sri Aurobindo ...
... In Rome, always a little blunt of perception in the aesthetic mind, her two greatest poets fell a victim to this unhappy conception, with results which are a lesson and a warning to all posterity. Lucretius' work lives only, in spite of the majestic energy behind it, by its splendid digressions into pure poetry, Virgil's Georgics by fine passages and pictures of Nature and beauties of word and image; ...
... and Philosophy What does your correspondent mean by "philosophy" in a poem? Of course if one sets out to write a metaphysical argument or treatise in verse like the Greek Empedocles or the Roman Lucretius, it is a risky business and is likely to land you into prosaic poetry which is a less pardonable mixture than poetic prose! Even when philosophising in a less perilous way, one has to be careful not ...
... of the Spirit's life-transmuting rhythm. Not that the new art will throw the achievement of past ages into the shade: Page 54 poetic excellence can be attained by the atheism of a Lucretius as well as by the Aurobindonian God-realisation, and nobody will ever outsing Valmiki and Homer and Shakespeare. But a new region of reality will be laid bare, untrodden expressive paths penetrated ...
... language of intuitive inspiration, illumination or the higher thinking and feeling. A very rich or great poetry may then emerge and many of the most powerful passages in Shakespeare, Virgil or Lucretius or the Mahabharata and Ramayana, not to speak of the Gita, the Upanishads or the Rig Veda have this inspiration. It is a poetry 'thick inlaid with patines of bright gold' or welling up in a stream ...
... adjective does not only mean: "exalted" by the wonder visited during slumber. I believe the literal Latin shade is present as in that phrase where, after saying that God made animals earthward-looking, Lucretius tells us: "os sublime dedit homini"—"He gave man an uplifted face." Sri Aurobindo's "child" awakes with her eyes physically uplifted, looking above: a concrete pictorial touch goes with the general ...
... Satan coming alive, and Virgil his heroic Aeneas and his tragic Dido — but most of the other characters are a little wooden. Among those who have just missed entering the third row are the Roman Lucretius, the Greek Euripides, the Spanish Calderon, the French Corneille and Hugo, the English Spenser. While mentioning the various names I noticed one of you trying to anticipate the roll by whispering ...
... called traditional. But to be traditional is not to be debarred from originality and greatness. While being traditional, one can be, if one has the genius, as original and great as Homer, Virgil, Lucretius, Marlowe, Milton, Keats. An infinite diversity is possible within traditionalism, and numberless heights and depths of vision and emotion can be reached through traditional technique. There is quite ...
... Kronos, 159 Kushika, 220 Kutsa, 162 LAKSHMI, 293 Lalan the Fakir, 223 Lamartine, 54 Laocoon, 170 Lao Tzu, 132 Lawrence, D. H., 88 London, 127, 163 Lucifer, 5, 125 Lucretius, 52, 70, 101 -De Rerum Natura, 52 Luther, 273 HUCHCHANDA, 162 Mahabharata, the, 73, 235 Maitreyi, 105 Malebranche, 286 Mallarme, 66, 88, 152 -"Les Fleurs", 66n ...
... the truths for which he stood—he had a fine and powerful weapon in his prose to do the work, even then in a poetic way—but to sing them. And he sang them not in their philosophical bareness, like a Lucretius, or in their sheer transcendental austerity like some of the Upanishadic Rishis, but in and through human values and earthly norms. The especial aroma of Tagore's poetry lies exactly here, as he ...
... ART AND LITERATURE World-Literature (I) ‘REAL poetry, the acme of poetical art,’ says Victor Hugo, ‘is characterised by immensity alone.’ That is why Aeschylus, Lucretius, Shakespeare and Corneille had conquered his heart. Had he been acquainted with Sanskrit literature he would have included Valmiki and the Vedic seers. As a matter of fact, what we want to derive ...
... London, 1959). Santayana, George. Essays in Literary Criticism, Selected and edited by Irving Singer (Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1956). Three Philosophical Poets : Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1935). Sarma, D.S. Studies in the Renaissance of Hinduism in the 19 th and 20 th centuries (Benares Hindu University, Benares ...
... Scythians. That position is now much assailed, and some would place him in the third or fourth century; others see ground to follow popular tradition in making him a contemporary of Virgil, if not of Lucretius. The exact date matters little. It is enough that we find in Kalidasa's poetry the richest bloom and perfect expression of the long classical afternoon of Indian civilisation. The soul of an age ...
... imitating the West, trying to become like it or partly like it and have fortunately failed, for that would have meant creating a bastard or twy-natured culture; but twy-natured, as Tennyson makes his Lucretius say, is no-natured and a bastard culture is no sound, truth-living Page 44 culture. An entire return upon ourselves is our only way of salvation. There is much to be said here, it ...
... that it appears to give quite another face of things and reveal quite another side of experience. A poet may have a religious creed or subscribe to a system of philosophy or take rank himself like Lucretius or certain Indian poets as a considerable philosophical thinker or succeed like Goethe as a scientist as well as a poetic creator, but the moment he begins to argue out his system intellectually in ...
... infallible viveka on this chaos of jostling opinions. I am not prepared to classify all the poets in the universe—it was the front bench or benches you asked for. By others I meant poets like Lucretius, Euripides, Calderon, Corneille, Hugo. Euripides ( Medea, Bacchae and other plays) is a greater poet than Racine whom you want to put in the first ranks. If you want only the very greatest, none ...
... intuitive inspiration, illumination or the higher thinking and feeling. A very rich or great poetry may then emerge and many of the most powerful passages in Shakespeare, Page 47 Virgil or Lucretius or the Mahabharata and Ramayana, not to speak of the Gita, the Upanishads or the Rig Veda, have this inspiration. It is a poetry "thick inlaid with patines of bright gold" or welling up in a stream ...
... seen first by a few, then by many, then by all. At first there may be adverse critics and assailants, but these negative voices die away. Questionings may rise from time to time—e.g. as to whether Lucretius was not a greater poet than Virgil—but these are usually from individuals and the general verdict abides always. Even lesser poets retain their rank in spite of fluctuations of their fame. You speak ...
... veil of human ignorance. It is no use for some to contend that Virgil is a tame and elegant writer of a wearisome work in verse on agriculture and a tedious pseudo-epic written to imperial order and Lucretius the only really great poet in Latin literature or to depreciate Milton for his Latin English and inflated style and the largely uninteresting character of his two epics; the world either refuses to ...
... intellectuality to leave out of his poetry. Men with intellects can be intense poets if they know how to put into their poems not their intellectuality but the passion of thought that often goes with it. Lucretius and Dante were such men, Milton also in his own manner. Shelley was another. Wordsworth too. In them thought was passionate, in Shakespeare passion was thinking. He seems time and gain to set up fireworks ...
... adjective does not only mean "exalted" by the wonder visited during slum-ber. I believe the literal Latin shade is present as in that phrase where, after saying that God made animals earthward-looking, Lucretius tells us: "os sublime dedit homini" — "He gave man an uplifted face." Sri Aurobindo's "child" awakes with her eyes physically uplifted, looking upward: a concrete pictorial touch goes with the general ...
... supreme work on a supreme scale is possible more to those who have such a sense not only implicit but explicit. Let me repeat that Shelley and Keats are not greater than Shakespeare, or even than Lucretius who was an avowed atheist and materialist. But they could have been greater in poetic expression if they had found the right milieu and consciousness and manner for the spiritual bent of their true ...
... No doubt, the qualities mentioned are there, but in isolation from several others they look somewhat hap-hazard. Thus it is a mistake to confine energy to Romanticism. If Homer and Aeschylus, Lucretius and Milton are not energetic, then one does not know what energy can mean. Only, theirs is an energy more contained, more organised than in the Roman-tics. Again, to give spirituality to Romanticism ...
... Page 81 "What does your correspondent mean by 'philosophy' in a poem? Of course if one sets out to write a metaphysical argument in verse like the Greek Empedocles or the Roman Lucretius it is a risky business and is likely to land you into prosaic poetry which is a less pardonable mixture than poetic prose. Even when philosophising in a less perilous way, one has to be careful ...
... eminent poet, carried the soul of past music mingled with a spirit that makes all things new. In fact, he had the avowed ambition to gather up in his Paradise Lost Aeschylus and Sophocles, Virgil, Lucretius and Dante into a mature mastery of style animated by his own genius and character. A consummate scholar in various literatures, deeply saturated with the great traditions of poetry, Sri Aurobindo ...
... clearness which made his style the legitimate foundation for all future poetry. Virgil marked almost a ne plus ultra of poetical Latinity; Spenser had a chord or two missing because no Lucretius and Catullus prepared his way and also on account of a certain dearth in himself of direct passion and that epic fibre which, for all his tendency towards the effeminate, Virgil never lacked — yet ...
... comes flawless, the divinity in art suffers no wrong; it consents to be worshipped in passionate Dionysiac temples as in fanes of Apollonian calm, to lust on Sappho's lips and deny the gods with Lucretius just as excellently as to weave Tagore's song-garlands for an immortal Beloved and, through Dante, hear even the mouth of hell declare God's mercy. Else it would be curious that the largest poetic ...
... opening through Savitri 286 R Racine 206 Ramayana 60,140,182, 327 Reynolds, Barbara 210 Rig-veda 97,141,207,298 Rilke 154 Rishis 1,4,344 Ritam 43 Roman Lucretius 161 S S samadhi 29 samskāras 321 Sat 247 Savitri inRigveda 4-5 who is Savitri 6 Savitri (1) General appreciation of 64 approach to 270 ...
... Poetry by itself is not necessarily a spiritual art in any immediate sense. A poet can write all sorts of things which we do not associate with spirituality: a man can even be an atheist, as the Roman Lucretius was, and still be a major poet. How this could be is well hit off by the English poetess Elizabeth Browning. She has written about Lucretius's atheism that he "denied divinely the Divine." There you ...
... hour. Speak over our graves within you: "Never breath Of sorrowful longing mars their passion-death." 20.6.32 * The first stanza is a free translation of some lines of Lucretius: Iam iam non domus accipiet te laeta, neque uxor Optima nec dulces occurrent oscula nati Praeripere et tacita pectus lulcedine tangent; Non petris factis florentibu i esse, tuisque ...
... feels or senses and never thinks or that Milton does the opposite. Milton could not be the poet he is if he never felt or sensed; but what separates him from Shakespeare and puts him with poets like Lucretius and Dante and Wordsworth and even Shelley whose style differs so much from his own is that the mind of thought works directly in him. He is a poet who puts into his poetry the passion of thought. ...
... Romans could legislate and fight, they could keep the state together, but they made the Greeks think for them. Of course the Greeks could fight also but not always so well. Take the Roman thinkers—Lucretius, Cicero, Seneca, all owe their philosophy to the Greeks. That, again, is an illustration of what I was saying about the inrush of forces. Consider a small race like the Greeks, living on a small ...
... out his philosophy in sheer poetry has been one of the rarest spectacles.¹ I can think of only one instance just now where a philosopher has almost succeeded being a great poet – I am referring to Lucretius and his De Rerum Natura. Neither Shakespeare nor Homer had anything ¹ James H. Cousins in his New Ways in English Literature describes Sri Aurobindo as "the philosopher as poet." Page ...
... the truths for which he stood-he had a fine and powerful weapon in his prose to do the work, even then in a poetic way-but to sing them. And he sang them not in their philosophical bareness, like a Lucretius, or in their sheer transcendental austerity like some of the Upanishadic Rishis, but in and through human values and earthly norms. The especial aroma of Tagore's poetry lies exactly here, as he himself ...
... me" and get some consolation. NIRODBARAN: That is when they are out of their misery. SRI AUROBINDO: No, in their miserable state itself they get relief. (After a little pause and smiling) Lucretius the Roman poet says somewhere, "It is sweet to sit on the shore and see people struggling in the sea." (Laughing) A Christian Father also says, "It is a great joy see people in Hell being tortured ...
... They see each other and know each other and respond to each other through all space and all bodies. Naturally, scientists will say that they have never seen the lights of the cell. Democritus and Lucretius had never seen atoms, and yet they were the first atomists. The Turning But first, She had to get out of the dark coating of the physical Mind, the thick crust that veils all the pure functioning ...
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