The Metamorphosis of De rerum natura

Ovid and Lucretius were two Roman philosopher poets. Lucretius De rerum natura and the 15 books of Ovid Metamorphosis anticipate Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost in the attempt to create an iconic and transcendent worldview. Both poets lived at height of the Roman empire with Ovid’s work attempting to account for Rome up to Caesar. They emanated from similar historical periods though their lives didn’t really overlap (Ovid was 2 years old when Lucretius died in 45 BC). But talk about CP Snow’s famedTwo Cultures essay in which the writer inveighed against the separation of science and art. Imagine Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time as a poem. Just think of  absorbing complex scientific concepts like Dark Matter and Dark Energy in verse form. Advanced ideas like the quantum notion that a subatomic particle can be in two places at the same time make more sense as prosody than they do when expressed as laws. 

read the latest review of The Kafka Studies Department by Francis Levy in Booklife

and read the Kirkus review of The Kafka Studies Department by Francis Levy