Everybody thinks they know all about Voltaire — they remember “Candide” from school days and they have seen his story adapted for the movies and Broadway. Today, 232 years after his death, he remains by far the best known of the 18th-century intellectual giants.

But the truth is, there is a lot more pure gold buried in his voluminous output. So much of his 15-million-word legacy is so exceptional and so little known.

Voltaire is one of those authors from the past who manages to resonate today. Perhaps his most important poem is the work dealing with the randomness of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, echoing sentiments about the recent Haiti tragedy. The two earthquakes wreaked similar degrees of death and destruction. These lines from his “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster” asked why it had to happen. Some Haitian poet is probably reworking it now:

Would you say, seeing this heap of victims,

That God is avenged, that their death is payment for their crimes?

What crimes, what bad things have been committed by these children,

Lying on the breasts of their mothers, flattened and bloody?