This paper, part of a larger project, posits an alignment between physics (the study of the natural world more generally) and poetics in the early modern period. In particular, I will examine the physics and poetics of Arthur Golding in his 1567 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses into English. Golding claimed that Ovid’s work offered a “dark philosophy of turnèd shapes,” a philosophy of substance and of change. As he translates Ovid, he reshapes the physics he finds, in the process offering a new theory of the nature of poetry, and of the relationship between poetry and physics.
Liza Blake is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate Department of English at the University of Toronto, and in the Department of English and Drama at the University of Toronto Mississauga. She works at the intersection of literature, science, and philosophy in medieval and early modern literature, and is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Early Modern Literary Physics.
