Stephen Greenblatt’s “The Swerve,” reviewed by Michael Dirda

THE SWERVE

How the World Became Modern

(Norton) - \"The Swerve: How the World Became Modern\" by Stephen Greenblatt

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By Stephen Greenblatt

Norton. 354 pp. $26.95

Years ago, the Yale critic Harold Bloom promulgated “clinamen” — that is, “the swerve,” a term derived from Lucretius’s philosophical poem “On the Nature of Things” — as central to his controversial theory of literary influence. Writers, Bloom speculated, swerve away from the dominion, the overpowering authority, of earlier masters to clear a poetic space for their own work. Since then, other literary theorists — many of them, as you would guess, French — have employed their own notions of “clinamen.”

So it seems odd that Stephen Greenblatt in “The Swerve” never mentions this familiar Bloomian use of “clinamen.” Perhaps Greenblatt, who attended Yale, is himself swerving away from an older anxiety-producing master.

Or has he, in fact, like the later Bloom — the Bloom who churns out theme anthologies of his favorite poems — resolutely entered into the popularizing phase of his career? When young, Greenblatt was the principal founder of the New Historicism, in which texts are examined in close connection to their culture and times, and soon rose to become one of our most noted Shakespeare scholars, the holder of a chair at Harvard and the general editor of that great academic money-maker “The Norton Anthology of English Literature.”

But then in 2004, he brought out “Will in the World,”a life and times of Shakespeare, and this proved — such things do happen — a bestseller. In the book, Greenblatt spoke with considerable authority, reflecting a lifetime of thought and speculation about Shakespeare’s plays and career. But “The Swerve,” an account of how the rediscovery of the Latin poet Lucretius shook up the Renaissance, is a work that a journalist or a hard-working amateur might have produced, a sprawling paraphrase of other people’s research. Greenblatt’s 41 pages of end notes and 26 pages of bibliography conscientiously reveal his mining of old and recent scholarship, whether John Addington Symonds’s “The Revival of Learning” (the second volume of his 19th-century classic, “The Renaissance in Italy”) or Ingrid Rowland’s recent “Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic.” In short, this is a book that feels a little mushy and over-sweetened, in the way of so much popular history with an eye on the bestseller list.

In this vein, Greenblatt’s subtitle — “How the World Became Modern” — makes an arguable but slightly histrionic claim: Lucretius’s “De rerum natura” (“On the Nature of Things”), unearthed after centuries in an unknown monastery by the book hunter Poggio Bracciolini in 1417, pushed European civilization away from the religiosity of the Christian Middle Ages into a worldview that we recognize as our secular own.

Many readers are surprised to find that a book-length Latin poem, written in the 1st century B.C., is so remarkably beautiful and gripping, without being any less a didactic work of Epicurean philosophy, one that sets forth a resolutely materialist view of “the nature of things.” According to Lucretius, the gods may exist, but they are utterly indifferent to humankind. Atoms — very much like our modern idea of atoms — are the sole building blocks of the cosmos. Because the atoms occasionally wobble or swerve as they fall through space, collisions result, and from these collisions various complicated, sophisticated agglomerations are created, including people. Souls do not exist, and there is no afterlife. When we eventually die, our atoms disperse and our particular selves utterly disappear. Consequently, it is foolish to fear death since, in effect, we’ll never know we’re dead. Instead, we should simply enjoy this world and relish its pleasures (of which sex is a prominent example). The most truly wise, however, will prefer a simple, unruffled Epicureanism — the quiet enjoyment of plain but good food, the conversation of friends, an existence far removed from the hurly-burly of ambition and “making it.”