“transeant Things”: Materialism and Mortality in the Lyrics of Lucy Hutchinson and Margaret Cavendish

Abstract

The poetic atomism of Lucretius seems an obvious point of convergence between Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson, but this convergence is complicated both by their later disavowals of atomism and by scholarship that casts doubt on even their early interest in Lucretius. In this essay, I argue that in their lyrics, Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson engage Lucretius in a hybrid and nondogmatic way that is less focused on atomism’s physical system (that is, on the mechanics of atomist physics) than on using ideas from De rerum natura about poetry and mortality to think about memory, memorialization, and afterlives—of bodies, reputations, and texts. Both Cavendish and Hutchinson engage the issues of materiality and mortality at the heart of Lucretian thought as a way of conceptualizing the capacity of lyric poetry to depict the experience of change and loss at the heart of mortal life, the experience of both being and loving what Hutchinson in her elegies calls “transeant Things.” Hutchinson’s appreciation for and dwelling with “transeant Things” carves out a space within her elegies for an affirmation of both erotic love and also of lyric poetry. [J.H.]