Atom in Seventeenth-Century Poetry

An investigation into the remarkable "poetics of the atom" in English literary texts from the mid to late seventeenth century.

The early modern "atom" – understood as an indivisible particle of matter – captured the poetic imagination in ways that extended far beyond the reception of Lucretius and Epicurean atomism. Contrarily to fears of atomisation and materialist threat, many poets and philosoph...