Lucretius

"The great master of sympathy with nature, in my education, was Lucretius." --George Santayana, My Host The World, 134.

"A genius who warns you away from organized superstition and erotic frenzy might well be at a disadvantage these days. But Lucretius matters because no other poet teaches you so well not to fear death, a teaching in which Montaigne was Lucretius's follower. By bluntly dismissing survival and immortality, Lucretius seeks to bring you a freedom from dread and from melancholy, a freedom that most of us decline to accept...He confronts with serenity the violent world that his poem could not teach Vergil to bear serenely. His art is less varied than Vergil's, and its aesthetic effect upon me is not as great as Vergil's, but it does me more good to read Lucretius." --Harold Bloom, Genius, 68, 72.