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VoltaireThe Lisbon Earthquake
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1756A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
"An Essay on Man, Epistle 1" by Alexander Pope (1733)
Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man is made up of four epistles, or letters, that were published between 1733 and 1734. The poem is the preeminent example of Restoration-era poetic essay, and it shares many similarities with Voltaire’s “The Lisbon Earthquake.” Both, for instance, are written in heroic couplets. Both are also poems that set out to prove a point. Pope’s poem, Essay on Man, tries to "vindicate the ways of God to man" (Line 16). An Essay on Man is partially responsible for the spread of the optimistic philosophy Voltaire attacks in his poem. Voltaire engages with many ideas from Pope’s work, including the argument that people should not complain about their position because they cannot know God’s plan. Voltaire also took the line “what is, is right” in the subtitle of his poem from Line 292 of Pope’s first epistle.
"Mac Flecknoe" by John Dryden (1682)
John Dryden, along with Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, was one of the main innovators in English satirical verse in the 17th and 18th century. Mac Flecknoe is regarded as one of the most significant mock-heroic poems in the English language. Like the translation of Voltaire’s “The Lisbon Earthquake,” Mac Flecknoe uses heroic verse to create an ironic contrast between its form and its content. In Dryden’s work the contrast is most obvious, as it also adopts the tone of an epic, the traditional genre associated with heroic verse. In the poem, Dryden tells the story of an epic hero whose main character trait is their dullness.
"The world is too much with us" by William Wordsworth (1802)
The Romantic poets, such as William Wordsworth, came after the Age of Enlightenment. While many of the Romantic poets had similar educations in science and reason as their Enlightenment counterparts, they had a very different conception of the natural world and how humans should relate to it. Instead of being afraid of the unrelenting powers of the natural world, the Romantics saw a certain kind of beauty in these awesome powers. Wordsworth’s “The world is too much with us” is a seminal example of how the romantic sensibility relates to the natural world. It is also one of Wordsworth’s most philosophical poems and pairs well with Voltaire’s work for that reason.
Further Literary Resources
Candide by Voltaire (1759)
Voltaire’s satirical novel, Candide, develops many of the themes and arguments present in his earlier “the Lisbon Earthquake.” Like the poem, the novel is an attack on Leibnizian optimism. The main character is a young man called Candide, who was indoctrinated with the philosophy from a young age by his mentor Pangloss (Latin for “all talk”). The novel follows their picaresque adventures as the maxims of their philosophy are challenged in various ways. These challenges include a brief excursion to Lisbon at the time of the famous earthquake.
"The Lisbon Earthquake (1755)" by Jürgen Wilke (2017)
Wilke’s article, published by the Institute of European History, provides an informative overview of the Lisbon earthquake and how it informed discourse throughout Europe. Wilke provides information about the earthquake itself, the news of the event and how it traveled throughout Europe, the particular influence the event had in each European nation, and the ways that the earthquake shaped moral and philosophical discourse for years afterward. The article also takes visual representations of the earthquake into account as a way of understanding how people interpreted the events. Voltaire’s poem was not only an early document discussing the earthquake, it was one of the many ways that news of the event spread throughout Europe.
"The Optimistic Science of Leibniz" by Marc E. Bobro (2014)
In this article, Bobro introduces Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, one of the main philosophical targets of Voltaire’s philosophical satire in “The Lisbon Earthquake.” Bobro gives a brief summary of Leibniz’s life, works, and philosophical views without becoming bogged down in semantics or overexplaination. The third section of the article, titled “The Best of All Possible Worlds” explores the particular philosophical views that Voltaire engages with and ultimately dismisses in “The Lisbon Disaster.”
Selections from "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin Of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful" by Edmund Burke (1759)
These selections from Edmund Burke’s longer essay on the sublime illustrate some of the key differences between an Enlightenment and Romantic conception of nature. The idea of a “sublime” quality to the natural world, where the sheer scale and power of natural forces appear beautiful, was still developing when Voltaire wrote his poem on the Lisbon earthquake. Nevertheless, the sublime provides an alternative interpretation of the events Voltaire presents.
Burke was one of the foremost thinkers developing the notion of the sublime, and his ideas went on to influence the Romantic era of poetry.
Listen to Poem
There are no readings of the entirety of Voltaire’s “The Lisbon Earthquake” freely available. The video in the above link is of a reading of a shortened version—the 1912 Joseph McCabe translation of the same poem.
