How to Construct a Poem: Descartes, Sidney

Abstract

This essay explores the intimate bond in early modern Europe between the premier science of forms, geometry, and the premier art of forms, poetry. The connections between these (at least for us) seemingly disparate domains become especially evident in how geometry and poetry re-envisage the relationship of form to content, of the shapes they invent to the matters that constitute their specific concerns. I shall be seeking here to identify parallels that bespeak a broader, shared cultural response across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to an inherited Greek tradition, strongly marked by Aristotelian thought, in which what Sir Philip Sidney would later call the relation of “manner” to “matter” played a fundamental role. My argument places Rene Descartes alongside Sidney as two of the key figures whose contributions to the theory and practice of mathematics and poetry respectively reveal with especial vividness both the nature of this response and its implications for early modern selves and the worlds they sought to make.