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the experience of reading in Britain, from 1450 to 1945...

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Listings for Author:  

Lucretius

 

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Lucretius  : De rerum natura

" ... provocative omissions survive in ... [early modern manuscripts including] Lucy Hutchinson's ... translation of Lucretius' De rerum natura ..."

Century: 1600-1699     Reader/Listener/Group: Lucy Hutchinson      

  

Lucretius  : unknown

Tuesday 10 September 1918: 'My intellectual snobbishness was chastened this morning by hearing from Janet [Case] that she reads Don Quixote & Paradise Lost, & her sister Lucretius in the evenings.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Emphie Case      Print: Book

  

Lucretius  : 

From Emily Tennyson's diary (1865): 'Oct. 6th. A. read me some Lucretius, and the 1st Epistle of St Peter. (At work on his new poem of "Lucretius.")'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Print: Book

  

Lucretius  : De rerum natura

From F. T. Palgrave's 'Personal Recollections' of Tennyson: 'Often, I believe, as life advanced, he would renew earlier familiarity with the great poets of all time [...] One evening [...] he read out off-hand Pindar's great picture of the life of Heaven in the second Olympian into pure modern prose, splendidly lucid and musical [...] Another time, late over the midwinter fire, reading the terrible lines in which Lucretius preaches his creed of human annihilation (Book III. especially ll. 912-977, ed. Munro) [...] so carried away and overwhelmed were the readers by the poignant force of the great poet, that, next morning, when dawn and daylight had brought their blessed natural healing to morbid thoughts, it was laughingly agreed that Lucretius had left us last night all but converts to his heart-crushing atheism.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: (Included) Alfred Tennyson and Francis Turner Palgrave     Print: Book

  

Lucretius  : De rerum natura

George Grote to George W. Norman (April 1817): 'I send you down the best "Lucretius" I have [...] Though the reasoning is generally indistinct, and in some places unintelligible, yet in those passages where he indulges his vein of poetry without reserve, the sublimity of his conceptions and the charm and elegance of his language are such as I have hardly ever seen equalled [...] I likewise send you the Tragedies attributed to Seneca, which I think I have heard you express an inclination to read. I have read one or two of them, and they appeared to me not above mediocrity. **** 'I am now studying Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics." His reasonings on the subject of morals are wonderfully just and penetrating, and I feel anxious, as I read on, for a more intimate acquaintance with him. Hume's Essays, some of which I have likewise read lately, do not improve, in my view, on further knowledge.'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: George Grote      Print: Book

 

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