Three Philosophical Poets

Three Philosophical Poets, Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe, is by George Santayana. The preface says the volume is composed, with a few additions, of six lectures read at Columbia University in February, 1910, and repeated in April of the same year, at the University of Wisconsin. The preface describes the book as containing the impressions of an amateur, the appreciations of an ordinary reader, concerning three great writers.

The text says that if philosophy is thought of as an investigation into truth, or as reasoning upon truths supposed to be discovered, there is nothing in philosophy akin to poetry, and that there is nothing poetic about the works of Epicurus, or St. Thomas Aquinas, or Kant. The passage quotes Lucretius comparing physicians who administer loathsome wormwood to little boys, first moistening the rim of the cup round about with sweet and golden honey. The text says that, as Dante says, no man could hate his own soul.