ragamouf

"The physicist Niels Bohr was also acutely aware of the “crossover between math and ordinary language” within the “cultural manifold” of the early twentieth century. Having found in Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura a clue to cracking the atom, Bohr offered, in describing the situation of the quantum theorist, “What is it that human beings ultimately depend upon? We depend on our words. We are suspended in language. Our task is to communicate … without losing the objective or unambiguous character [of what we say],” and called on poets to help scientists in making the invisible visible. Wallace Stevens was one of those who responded, and it is significant that Fletcher centrally incorporates a passage from, as he puts it, “Stevens’ great essay,” “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” into his own argument: “Those of us who may have been thinking of the path of poetry, those who understand that words are thoughts and not only our own thoughts but the thoughts of men and women ignorant of what it is they are thinking, must be conscious of this: that, above everything else, poetry is words; and that words, above everything else, are, in poetry, sounds.” Fletcher himself, no less than Stevens, Lucretius, and the poets who “constellate [his] discussion,” is astutely attentive to the way in which the sound of words—of his own voice no less than of Shakespeare’s, “of how things are spoken, or ‘spoken out’ so as to convey what Roland Barthes called ‘the grain of the voice … the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs’”—expresses our mysterious “bond to all that dust,” to the ongoing process in which we are born out of stars in a “universe … of … varied orbiting bodies, with endless multiplications of the center … producing an expanding system of multiple, moving cynosures."

JOAN RICHARDSON writing about Angus Fletcher’s new book Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare.

http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/014_03/840

I’ve only just skimmed it, might turn out to be complete trollop, but there’s something beautiful/ interesting in the whole review.