Personal affinities and contrast between Lucretius and Virgil

The influence, direct and indirect, exercised by Lucretius on the thought, the composition, and the style of the Georgics was perhaps stronger than that ever exercised, before or since, by one great poet on the work of another. This influence is of the kind which is oftener seen in the history of philosophy than of literature. It was partly one of sympathy, partly of antagonism. Virgil's feeling and conception of Nature have their immediate origin in the feeling and thought of Lucretius; while at the same time his religious convictions and national sentiment derive new strength by reaction from the attitude assumed by his predecessor. This powerful attraction and repulsion were alike due to the fact that Lucretius was the first not only to reveal a new power, beauty, and mystery in the world, but also to communicate to poetry a speculative impulse, opening up, with a more impassioned appeal than philosophy can do, the great questions underlying human life,—such as the truth of all religious tradition, the position of man in the Universe, and the attitude of mind and course of conduct demanded by that position.

It was not however merely a poetical and speculative impulse that Virgil received from his predecessor. Lucretius was the only Latin poet since Ennius who had dealt with a great mass of materials and given to them the unity and continuity of a work of art of large dimensions and proportions.