The scientific portions of Lucretius' poem, that is, those passages which deal most explicitly and argumentatively with technical matters, are often disparaged, or at least tacitly ignored. At best they are tolerated for the sake of the proems and the “digressions.” As Bailey puts it in the introduction to his edition:

Bailey himself argues that “there are not in fact two styles; the one is only the heightening or intensification of the other,” but his argument is perfunctory and has certainly not prevailed against the general feeling among commentators and common readers alike that the technical parts of the De Rerum Natura are less interesting than the “poetic” passages.

The consensus that Epicurean philosophy constitutes an intrinsically unpoetic subject is perhaps derived from a famous passage in which Lucretius himself seems to say that his poetry is, in the modern cliché, merely the sugar coating on the bitter pill of his science. In his own image, he touches everything with the charm of the Muses just as doctors, when they try to give nasty wormwood to children, first smear the rims of the cup with honey.