This is a very welcome contribution coming from a comparatist to the much-neglected subject of the relationship between thought and poetry in Descartes. Here, the reader will not find an enquiry into the (few) texts in which Descartes speaks on poets or poetry. The aim of the book is indeed more ambitious: to retrace the implicit poetic structures and forms pervading Descartes's principal philosophical texts.
The author does not hide the originality and relevance of his method, which is more akin to lyric reading than to historicism, and which still focuses on early modern studies, but also concerns its results: these poetic structures and forms are seldom discussed or never noticed at all, in spite of a distinguished tradition of feminist and literary criticism interpreting Descartes's works (Kyoo Lee, Claudia Brodsky, Dalia Judovitz, R. Darren Gobert, and Hassan Melhey).
These poetic structures are basically four: riddles, love lyrics, elegies, and anagrams. Hence, the chapters of these works trace back to the four poetic structures, respectively: 1) the fable of the Discours; 2) the figure of the evil genius and the cogito in the Second Meditation, also considering Les passions de l’âme; 3) the meditator's reflection on his limits in the Fourth Meditation; 4) the Cartesian problem of the relationship between duration and time.
In some cases, Gadberry's objectives are achieved. According to the author, the analysis of the Fourth Meditation, in which the meditator encounters his own limitations in the form of a negative elegy, seems logically convincing. Here, the meditator questions himself five times repeatedly about the ultimate reasons for his limitations that fundamentally constitute the cause of the error, and he always does so in the lexical register of the quaero/conquero.
Other analyses are less convincing, and sometimes one gets the impression that the search for implicit poetic structures is somewhat forced. This is the case with the analysis of the figure of the evil genius in light of the poetic genre of lyric poetry. Gadberry argues that what the meditator resists (the evil genius) is not just falsehood, but seduction, and the means by which he resists is the negation that destroys both the world and his body. In this view, the evil genius would be a seductor and the ego the object of desire, which denies itself and would interject according to the usual metonymy proper to the poetic piece known as blason. Here, the Cartesian text is led directly to Petrarch and the ego to Laura, who is everywhere and nowhere. Though brilliant, this reading presents many difficulties: in particular, the fact that the ego retreats from the genius by destroying the self as an object of desire may apply at the most to my body, but not to external bodies (the world), which nevertheless, are also the object of negation.
On the whole, one has the impression that Descartes's recourse to the poetic background may be more justifiably discernible than in the contexts where he undertakes to expound his philosophy in the wake of common-sense opinions. (In a certain sense, this is also noted by the author: the evil genius seems to be the best candidate to index a literary Descartes.) It is surprising that Gadberry does not mention Pierre La Brosse's Corpus omnium veterum poetarum latinorum (1603), cited in the Olympica and which Descartes most certainly used (in the Leuven edition of 1603), the consideration of which could perhaps even have supported some of Gadberry's own claims. Overall, however, I believe that after reading Gadberry's beautiful book, one can no longer consider the possibility, according to the famous dictum attributed to Boileu, that Descartes “cut the throat of poetry.”
