In his new book, The Swerve, Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt tells the story of an ancient poem and a manuscript explorer, and resurrects a time when people truly loved books. Shakespeare ...

The subject of Lucretius's six-book poem De Rerum Natura was not war, love, myth or history – it was atomic physics Lucretius (full name Titus Lucretius Carus) lived in the first half of the century ...

This week in the magazine, Stephen Greenblatt explains how Lucretius and his poem "On the Nature of Things" shaped the modern world. Here Greenblatt reads a passage from John Dryden's translation of ...

Before he became a Professor of literature at Harvard, and way before he wrote his classic Shakespeare biography, Will in The World, Stephen Greenblatt was an I'll-read-anything kind of kid. One day, ...

Lucretius (c. 99 B.C.-c. 55 B.C.), author of De Rerum Natura, was a Roman poet and philosopher who explained and expounded the beliefs of the Greek philosopher Epicurus—advocating a happy, tranquil ...

Epicurus didn't like poetry. He thought it was unclear in comparison to prose, and in his own works used prose, often of a sparse and crabby variety. A wise man will be able to talk about poetry, ...

In 1585, the greatest Elizabethan scientist, Thomas Harriot, was sent by his patron, Sir Walter Raleigh, to the nascent English colony in Virginia to assess the natural resources, observe the ...

What do Stevie Wonder and Lucretius, the Roman poet who wrote "The Nature of the Universe," have in common? As it turns out, more than you'd think. While jogging yesterday, I listened to Stevie Wonder ...