![]() “The core of Lucretius’ poem is a profound, therapeutic meditation on the fear of death, and that fear dominated my entire childhood,” Mr. ![]() ![]() The book spoke to him for a reason that’s straight out of a Woody Allen movie or a Bruce Jay Friedman novel: because of his own overbearing Jewish mother. Greenblatt read “On the Nature of Things” that golden summer. He plucked it from a Yale Co-op bargain bin for 10 cents, partly because he liked its sexy cover, a pair of disembodied legs floating above the Earth in an apparent act of “celestial coition.” Greenblatt came upon a prose translation of Lucretius’ 2,000-year-old poem “On the Nature of Things” (“De Rerum Natura”). In the mid-1960s, when he was a student at Yale and searching for summer reading, Mr. The literary critic, theorist and Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt’s new book, “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern,” is partly about an obsessive book collector, and it begins, appropriately enough, with a book purchase of the author’s own. ![]()
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