Okay, I know. This poem is not only too long and too tedious, it is also a smug attack on people of faith and has a deeply pernicious historic legacy. But it is also a fascinating and historically important work by one of the most influential writers in the history of literature. And it is timely because it was written in reaction to a natural disaster caused by an earthquake and a subsequent tsunami that was even more horrendous in relative terms than the recent similar incident in Asia that has dominated the news worldwide in the past two weeks.

The famous Lisbon earthquake occurred at 9:30 in the morning on November 1, 1755. It is said to have lasted for three-and-a-half minutes, causing gigantic fissures five meters wide to rip apart the city center. Fact-index.com offers the following description of the damage.

The survivors rushed to the open space of the docks for safety and watched as the water receded, revealing the sea floor, littered by lost cargo and old shipwrecks. Moments later an enormous tsunami engulfed the harbour, and the city downtown. In the areas unaffected by the tidal wave, fire quickly broke out, and flames raged for five days.

Lisbon was not the only Portugese city affected by the catastrophe. All the South of the country, namely Algarve was affected and destruction was generalized. The shockwaves of the earthquake were felt throughout Europe and North Africa. Tsunamis up to twenty meters in height swept the coast from North Africa to Finland and across the Atlantic to Martinique and Barbados.

Of a population of 275,000, about 90,000 were killed. Another 10,000 were killed across the Mediterranean in Morocco. Eighty-five percent of Lisbon's buildings were destroyed, including its famous palaces and libraries. Several buildings which had suffered little damage due to the earthquake were destroyed by the fire.

At the time, Lisbon was the fourth largest city in Europe, behind London, Paris, and Naples, and certainly one of the wealthiest. Also at the time, Europe was in the early stages of the Enlightenment and thus was embroiled in a raging debate over religion, which came down to a contest between faith and reason. Voltaire was the principal champion of reason, and quickly seized upon the Lisbon earthquake to question how a just God could allow such a thing to occur.

He focused his argument on a popular proposition that had been put forth by Gottfried Leibnitz several decades earlier, namely that God had created this world and that it was therefore the best of all possible worlds, and that the presence of evil in this world was not a defect but a necessary means of creating a contrast for good. Voltaire's initial shot in this campaign came in the form of this week's poem. Later, he turned many of the thoughts contained in this poem into the theme for his most famous satire, Candide.

As surely as Uncle Tom's Cabin did not cause the Civil War, this poem did not cause the Enlightenment attack on religion. But just as Ms. Stowe's little book was a significant literary milestone on the path to that war, this poem was a significant literary milestone on the path to Europe's slow separation from its Christian roots, which was a path that led directly to socialism, communism, Nazism, fascism, and all the other utopian "isms" that have together caused more death, destruction, pain, and hardship to mankind than all the earthquakes that have occurred since the beginning of time.