The Physics of Poetic Form in Arthur Golding’s Translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Abstract

This essay argues that we can enrich our understandings of form and formalisms if we return to early modernity’s rich variety of physics. The central object of study is the relationship between physics and poetics in Arthur Golding’s 1567 English translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Although this translation is commonly cast today as the work of an unsophisticated or moralizing Puritan, Golding claimed that Ovid’s work offered a “dark philosophy of turnèd shapes,” a natural philosophy of substance and change. As Golding translates, he systematically reshapes the physics he finds in Ovid, converting Ovid into a crypto-Neo-Platonist and, in the process, offering a new physics and poetics revolving around the concept of shape—a concept similar to but not identical with our modern understanding of form. In Golding’s translation, poetics becomes not just a way of communicating or elaborating natural philosophy, but the mechanism for exploring the nature of the universe. [L.B.]