By CLIVE JAMES [Poetry] – The threat posed by the spectacular expression that outruns its substance was a long-running theme in Shakespeare, and is surely one of the preoccupations that now make him seem so modern. Though he seems modern in every age—modern all over again—he seems especially modern in ours, when we look at him from the angle of analytical philosophy, a school of thought which has, at its tutorial center, a concern for scrupulosity of language: the scrupulosity that was incarnated by Wittgenstein, and as much in his likes as his dislikes. Wittgenstein’s admiration for Mörike depended on the poet’s determination that the word should not exceed the thing. We should be slow to read back from the grim philosopher agonizing over a conceptual nuance for weeks on end in his cold digs to the fluent playwright composing a whole different version of act v on Monday night before the new play opened on Tuesday, but it still seems legitimate to propose that Shakespeare was concerned enough by the capacity of his own facility to fly off by itself, and thus to want it anchored to something solid.

It might seem madness to suppose that Shakespeare shared the same conviction about the seductive power of words as Wittgenstein, but it should be possible at least to entertain the notion that Shakespeare could not have created his most evocative enchantments without a notion of limit and precision; and all precision, in language, eventually depends on a disciplined adherence to thought. The process of composition might produce a new thought—always one of the best reasons for composing in verse at all—but the new thought, too, has to test out, meeting a standard of quality if not of contiguity. Although the combination of thoughts might fiercely resist being reduced to a prose equivalent—think of almost any striking stanza by, say, John Crowe Ransom—it must be something more than a vague suggestion towards the indefinable. (If Mallarmé seems to do that, it is because he is treating the indefinable as his subject.) When, in later Shakespeare, we have trouble anchoring an image to a thought, it’s at least worth considering that the thought has gone awry—that the deeper consideration is not fully formed—before deciding that we have been granted an insight into the inexplicable. But we would not even conceive of such a possibility if we did not have, as a measure, everything that Shakespeare had already done. It’s his store of dazzling clarities that warns us against the assumption that there might be a further profundity in the obscure.

Continued at Poetry | More Chronicle & Notices.