1 - Atomic Congruity: The Philosophical Poetry of Henry More

Summary

Since beginning work on More as a graduate student, I have been asked several times why I choose to write about ‘bad poetry’. The question may be tongue-in-cheek, but it rests on a critical commonplace that has long disheartened readers of More's early philosophy. More's prose has a level of elegance that is lacking in his ‘conspissate’ Spenserian stanzas, where the inclusion of words like ‘swonk’ did not exactly help his cause. As early as 1650, only eight years after the first publication of the Cambridge Platonist's verse, the alchemist Thomas Vaughan (no fan of More’s) dismissed the author as ‘a poet in the loll and trot of Spenser’, a mindless imitator of outdated poesy. In 2016, Guido Giglioni reviewed a new study of More's metaphysics by Jasper Reid and made the following insight:

More's philosophical inquiry feeds on experiments, stories, and visions, and these become an organic part of his metaphysical equipment. This, of course, was a hazardous and edgy undertaking, which no doubt contributed to the bad reputation associated with the style of More's philosophizing. Perhaps due to his poetic vein (the question of its aesthetic value is not relevant here), More was prone to linguistic exuberance.

Giglioni's observation is an illuminating one for those embarrassed by More's poetry. He claims that More's philosophy ‘feeds on’ creative hypothesis and fiction: there was something about his early poetic impulse that was essential to the growth of his metaphysics. Giglioni's follow-up point, however, that this ‘poetic vein’ resulted in ‘hazardous’ effects of ‘linguistic exuberance’, omits half of the story. More's ‘linguistic exuberance’ was not a side-effect of an over-active imagination, but a purposeful style he considered essential for philosophical communication. It was also a key drive behind his need for poetry. The coining of new words was an inseparable part of the poetic act, and wordiness a requisite of actualising theories about lofty matters. It is telling that, in Giglioni's review, the supposedly dubious quality of More's poetry is once again acknowledged; but why must the question of aesthetic value be irrelevant?

More's early publications forge a link between poetic form and the founding of philosophical theories. Specifically, and crucially for this study, there is an important connection between More's experimental poetics and the construction of a hybrid Platonic–Epicurean atomism.