The Romantic Fragment Poem and the Performance of Form

Abstract

ANDREW ALLPORT The Romantic Fragment Poem and the Performance ofForm i.“Defect of undercurrent” and Other Definitions R omanticism’s claim to inventing the fragment poem has come under fire in recent years. Leonard Barkan has argued convincingly in Unearthing the Past that the deliberate creation and appreciation of frag­ ments as fragments was an aesthetic practice as early as the Italian Renais­ sance, and that Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures and sketches were val­ ued for their possibility, not their completion: “The non finito is not a mere romantic anachronism but a real expression of early modern artistic culture.”' Other scholars have suggested that what we call the Romantic fragment is formally part of a mixed genre that goes back at least to Pe­ trarch, and includes Sterne and Diderot as predecessors, particularly for the long and digressive fragment poems of Byron.2 Others have argued for the extended influence of Romantic fragments into Modernist and even Postmodern poetry. At the heart of all these discussions, of course, is the contested definition of an artistic “fragment,” and the hope that we might come to a consensus here on a definition, much less an origin, is surely fu­ tile. But the nature of these disagreements, particularly over the canonical fragments of Romanticism, is instructive, I think, because it highlights a deeper discomfort with the notion of artistic intent. Theories which find a way to make particular fragment poems “complete,” in other words, presume a particular definition of poetry, and the amorphousness of the fragment allows each critic to put what are essentially matters of taste into formal terms. Are there, then, formal differences between the canonical I. Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renais­ sance Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 207. 2. Specifically, this claim is made by Elizabeth Wanning Harries in “‘Unfinish’d Sen­ tences’: The Romantic Fragment,” A Companion to European Romanticism (Oxford: Blackwell , 2005), 371. Making the case for a “poetics of arrest” rather than fragmentation, Balachandra Rajan emphasizes the idea of Romantic and Modernist poetry’s “avoidance of closure” in The Form of the Unfinished (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 4—5. SiR, 51 (Fall 2012) 399 400 ANDREW ALLPORT fragments and the obscure ones? Or just varying degrees of success in pro­ voking our need, as readers, for completion? Say we begin with that most ingenious fragment, Samuel Taylor Cole­ ridge’s “Kubla Khan,” both a dream and a fragment according to its title, and the most famous fragment of the Romantic period, perhaps the most famous fragment poem in the English literary canon, the predecessor (if not the originator) of a form that includes Keats’s “Hyperion,” Words­ worth’s “The Danish Boy,” Byron’s Don Juan, and Shelley’s “The Tri­ umph of Life,” all of which were described as “fragments” upon publica­ tion. As a dream, “Kubla Khan” has become a collective one of which “everything is known . . . except what it is about,” as George Watson put it over forty years ago.5 Many of the critical studies of “Kubla Khan” delineate terms at their outset that are actually designed to disqualify the poem as a literal fragment, preferring, as it were, to use it for more symbolic ends. It is as though the term “fragment,” so perfect a metaphor for other aspects of the poem, can­ not also be a factual description of its form. In previous treatments of “Kubla Khan” the poem is made whole, so that its stated fragmentariness must be understood as something other than its form: an idea, a modality, a condition, a manner, an imperative. For example, Thomas McFarland be­ gins his study with the statement “Kubla Khan ... is as fully terminated as any poem in the language.”3 4 Therefore, its fragmentariness must be con­ strued from the biographical events surrounding its composition; the opium-induced dream and its interruption constitute the fragment, not the poem itself. “Kubla Khan” symbolizes the ruins of the poet’s own life in the supposed incompleteness presented to the reader in its prefatory note. McFarland’s analysis convincingly illustrates both the power and the short­ comings of such an approach. In large...