The Romantic Fragment Poem

A Critique of a Form

Marjorie Levinson

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780807865620, 9780807816844
• eBook ISBN: 9781469610177
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

The fragment poem, long regarded as a peculiarly Romantic phenomenon, has never been examined outside the context of thematic and biographical criticism. By submitting the unfinished poems of the English Romantics to both a genetic investigation and a reception study, Marjorie Levinson defines the fragment’s formal character at various moments in its historical career. She suggests that the formal determinancy of these works, hence their expressive or semantic affinities, is a function of historical conditions and projections.

The English Romantic fragment poems share not so much a particular mode of production as a myth of production. Levinson pries apart these two dimensions and analyzes each independently to consider their relationship. By reconstructing the contemporary reception of such works as Wordsworth’s “Nutting,” Coleridge’s “Christabel” and “Kubla Khan,” Shelley’s “Julian and Maddalo,” and Keats’s Hyperion fragments, and juxtaposing this model against dominant twentieth-century critical paradigms, Levinson discriminates layers, phases, and kinds of intentionality in the poems and considers the ideological implications of this diversity.

This study is the first to investigate the English Romantic fragment poem by identifying the assumptions — contemporary and belated — that govern interpretative procedures. In a substantial summary chapter, Levinson reflects upon the meaning and effects of these assumptions with respect to the facts and fictions of literary production in the period and to the processes of canon formation.

Originally published in 1986.

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NOTES

Chapter 1

1. Lucien Goldmann’s comment on Pascal’s Pensees (“paradoxical masterpieces, achieved by [their] inachievement”). Quoted in Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin (New York and Princeton: Columbia and Princeton University Presses, 1981), p. 3.

2. Uri Margolin, “On Three Types of Deductive Models in Genre Theory” ROZPRAWT 17 (1974):5–19, 13.

3. Let me present an instructive defense of the position currently accorded the RFP: “As a formal category, strictly considered, I’m not sure that too much needs to be said about the RFP. To be sure, it is not the subject of any of the extant literature.... But part of the reason for this... is that it is very much accepted as familiar that the ’fragment’ is a very important theme in Romanticism.” The author of this informal commentary, David Simpson, justifies our critical silence on the subject of the RFP by invoking our practical recognition of the “fragment.” By thus bracketing the word, however, he negates the formal determinacy of fragment poems at any given moment, emphasizing instead the conceptual and disembodied character of the referent. Surely the consensus use of a concept does not obviate its articulation; quite the contrary, it should supply a special motive for formal description, the caveat here being the distinction between “formal” and “formalist.” What Simpson neglects is that the “fragment,” a theme, is largely the product of actual poems and of the meanings that have been read off from them. As long as criticism persists in speaking of fragment poems as “the fragment,” they (“it”) will effectively repel analytic attempts. Or, in thematizing and unself-consciously totalizing fragment poems, we constrain ourselves to a paraphrastic critique. That there is something willful in this perverseness and obsequious to the projections of the works thus mystified, is a suspicion we do well to entertain.

4. McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin, p. 4.

5. Marilyn Buder, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).

6. The best source for Romantic commentary on “the fragmentary” is the Elgin Marbles discussion and, generally, nineteenth-century appreciations of the fine arts. This is not the context of an abstract or theoretical discourse, but the marbles, along with certain paintings and sculptures, did provoke writers to reflect somewhat more generally than was their wont on the idea of the imperfect.

See, for example, the “Summary of the Opinions of Benjamin West, Esq,” from “Abstract of a Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons, on the Earl of Elgin’s Sculptured Marbles, etc” Annals of the Fine Arts 1 (1817):241, 242:

He [Benjamin West] considers, that great improvement of our British artists, may be expected from this acquisition, as it is in these marbles which is seen source from which they grew, and that source is now as open as when they carried into being, because it came from nature, which is eternal...

—In comparing the Theseus and the Ilissus, with the Barberini faun, and their comparative money value, he [West] reckons the three figures to be in the very highest class of art, and the very able restoration of the mutilated parts of the latter, renders it more agreeable to view as a whole, but not more valuable, or superior in style of art, or equal to the figures of the Theseus, or the Ilissus.

Letters on Subjects connected with the Fine Arts. By B. R. Haydon, Esq. Letter 2 to the Critic on Barry’s Works in the Edinburgh Review (August 1810):278–79 and 281:

Nothing can be more delightful than the real momentary expressions of feeling in the great artists, Rubens, Titian, Vandyke, Tintoretto, and Rembrandt; let them scrawl their brush in any way, you see by what they did, they could do more: their clashes were not those of random ignorance, but of minds in a heat, who could not stay to express more than the leading points of things, and when they were hinted were content. "What can be more unfinished," say they in excuse [of indolent indulgence of feeling as opposed to attempted excellence] "than Rubens?" The dash, we answer, that may appear careless unfinishing to the ignorant eye, to the feeling and the educated one, is known to be the result of the deepest principle; and at the proper distance will be seen by both to be the leading characteristic of the thing expressed by a touch. "He that leaves his pictures rough, like Titian," says Reynolds, "without his principles, will indeed produce ‘goffe pitture,’ as Vasari calls them;" and the student that dashes, because Rubens appears to dash, without reflection, has begun at the wrong end.

Proper finishing is seizing the leading points of things with truth and correctness, that they may predominate over the subordinate parts, though the subordinate parts are not to be neglected. The reverse is the character of the French school; and of David.. . .

7. Edward Bostetter, The Romantic Ventriloquists (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963; rev. ed. 1975). Balachandra Rajan’s The Form of the Unfinished: English Poetics from Spenser to Pound (Princeton, 1985) appeared too late for me to profit by its methodological innovations and critical insight. With Rajan’s ambitious, wide-ranging study, Bostetter’s intensive work, and McFarland’s philosophical investigations we now have what looks like the framework for a richly historical study of the Romantic fragment.

8. As Michael Riffaterre has so effectively argued, questions of genre and the literary period cannot be dissociated. Riffaterre, “The Stylistic Approach to Literary History,” NLH 1 (Autumn 1970): 39–56. My remarks throughout this chapter are informed by this issue of NLH, an issue devoted to problems of literary reception, genre, and form in relation to our notions of literary history. My investigations of works and responses produced in the early nineteenth-century in England will, I hope, add to our understanding of that interval: its ideas of order and its determinate disorders. I will not, however, initially characterize that era or its ideologies in order to deduce its forms.

9. Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Roudedge and Kegan Paul, 1978). My understanding of the lapses, lacunae, disjunctions, and irresolution so emphatically represented by the RFP is largely indebted to Macherey’s work.

10. For an excellent critique of this tendency, see Paul Hamilton, Coleridge’s Poetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), pp. 18 and 7–26.

11. Hans Jauss, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” NLH 1 (Autumn 1970): 13, 14.

12. My omission of Blake requires a more substantial defense, in light of the Zoos and, more importantly, with respect to the overall relation of engraving (and coloring) to text in his oeuvre.

I approach this question by way of some recent commentary by students of “the fragmentary” in Romantic and modem art, a commentary that draws upon the concept of the “non finito” in Renaissance aesthetics for its explanatory model. See Eric Rothstein, “‘Ideal Presence’ and the ’Non Finito’ in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 9 (1976):307–32; and David Rosand, ’Composition/Decomposition/Recomposition: Notes on the Fragmentary and Artistic Process,” in Fragments: Incompletion and Discontinuity, ed. L. Kritzman and J. Plottel (New York: New York Literary Forum, 1981), pp. 17–30. Irresolution in Renaissance sculpture and painting is typically read as the sign of a conception so mighty that it outstrips the artist’s powers of execution; or, it so fills him with sublime ambition that he becomes impatient of mere detail or “finish”; or again, it insists on an unconventional and unaccommodated representation. Michelangelo’s sculptural fragments, “Slaves”—mighty, muscular figures straining to detach themselves from their stony medium—could stand as a topos for this conceptual model.

This model, consistent with certain received notions about Romantic art, consorts neither with the conditions of literary enterprise in early nineteenth-century England, nor with the feel of most RFPs. These are subjects I address at some length in the conclusion to this book. For now, let me note that the fragment poem, like so many Romantic inventions, was etiologically a defense against the poets’ experience of marginality; its underlying purpose was to turn that ignominy to advantage. Insofar as marginality means, in real terms, enforced passivity or impotence, the logical sublimation of this experience was the valorization of a voluntary passivity, suggesting a retirement into unlimited potentids and disdain for manifest and effective action. There is an easy indifference—even diffidence—an apparently effortless grace about the RFP that is meant to suggest the artist’s disdain for exertion rather than his exhaustion in the face of surpassing ambition. Valery’s pronouncement—“a work is not so much finished as abandoned”—more accurately describes the RF”’s projection than does Ruskin’s “no great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure.” The very notion of work is inappropriate to the RFP—by its own account, an easy gesture. By omitting from his composition (conventional) signs of artifice, the poet communicates not so much his contempt for finish per se (although this attitude is involved) as for the labor thereby expressed and the servility thus implied. The poet’s feigned indifference to reception amounts to a claim of autonomy, and the withholding of closure is of tremendous expedience in this strategy.

Blake’s political and intellectual context—that of the Enlightenment, with its belief in the efficacy of art and the practical uses of vision—deeply informs his fragments, and his whole canon. The Renaissance “non finito” is, for Blake, an apt phenomenology (“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough”). All Blake’s poems (except, perhaps, the Songs of Innocence and of Experience) suggest urgent exploration—a strenuous and Promethean essay that cannot conclude, it can only cease, for its vision so far exceeds historically available mate...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• One: Preliminaries
• Two: Backgrounds
• Three: The True Fragment: “Nutting”
• Four: The True Fragment: “Christabel”
• Five: The Completed Fragment: “Kubla Khan”
• Six: The Completed Fragment: “The Giaour”
• Seven: The Deliberate Fragment: “A Fragment,” or “When, to their airy hall”
• Eight: The Deliberate Fragment: The Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson
• Nine: The Deliberate Fragment: “Julian and Maddalo”
• Ten: The Dependent Fragment: “Hyperion” and “The Fall of Hyperion”
• Eleven: The Dependent Fragment: The Victorian Paradigm
• Twelve: Meanings and Purposes
• Thirteen: Appendix: “The Ruined Cottage”
• Notes
• Index