Book Review of Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve

Review of Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve

Just finished up The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt. It was a beautiful book. Greenblatt was Harold Bloom’s student at Yale. Greenblatt represents the diametric opposite of Bloom’s theories by looking at the history of what influenced literary poets and writers. Bloom likes looking at the psychological dynamics affecting poets. Greenblatt’s book is about the rediscovery of the Roman philosopher and poet Lucretius’s poem On the Nature of Things influenced by the theories of Epicureanism that seek to pleasure and to avoid pain. Lucretius poetically proposes that the world is governed by atoms “swerving” (clinamen in Greek) according to laws of physics and chaos. Much of the book is set in the Renaissance and discusses the time that leads up to the Reformation. Lucretius was lost for centuries but rediscovered by Poggio Bracciolini — a reminiscent figure of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose characters who love books. Poggio is a former Papal Secretary to a Pope who was declared an Anti-Pope and deposed. The book talks a lot about how many bad things people in the Catholic church were, how depraved the clergy in Rome were. But at the same time how they supported the arts, humanistic discussion, and philosophical debates. This of course is all pre-Protestant Reformation. Greenblatt is extremely anti-religion, anti-belief in an afterlife, and anti-anything metaphysical in general but he has a favorable outlook on Protestantism because it helped dismantle the Catholic Church. Ultimately, Lucretius was banned by the Catholic Church until the 1960s as books that Catholics were not allowed to read. Pretty wild and speaks to how incredible Lucretius is.

So, in short, this book is two books.

The first is a medieval and Renaissance book lover’s dream. It’s about the love of books, the love of searching for and saving books. And it’s a wonderful history of the times about how books existed in the decades up to and prior to the Printing Press. The second book is a vehement polemic against religion on the basis of Lucretius and the abuses of the Catholic Church at that time.

The last line of the book is about Thomas Jefferson. Evidently, he had five copies in Latin of Lucretius. Greenblatt uses this to show the atoms of Lucretius ended up affecting Thomas Jefferson’s views in the Declaration of Independence and the formation of the American state and form of government.

“I am an Epicurean.” — Thomas Jefferson

By Charles Lincoln

© Charles Edward Andrew Lincoln IV

Images from Wikipeida. I claim no ownership.