Partial arts: Poetic obsessions with the fragment

UnrestrictedThrough a series of interrelated fragment texts that include Romantic and contemporary authors, this dissertation investigates the genealogy and the elasticity of the fragment poem as a formal conceit in poetry. Where does the fragment come from, and where does it go? Using texts ranging from High Romanticism to contemporary altered books, this study links the fragment form to poetry’s ambivalent attitudes toward legibility and to its interrogation of the usefulness of form itself. Far from a Romantic anachronism, the fragment is still a vital poetic form. In fact, this dissertation argues that the fragment is to the form by which the contemporary understands and reconstructs its past. As such, it is the ideal form in which to locate contemporary poetic attitudes toward literary history and heritage. From Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," the remnant of an imagined longer poem, to Radi Os, a version of Paradise Lost made by cutting away Milton's language, I locate a tradition that continually reinvents the relationship between author and reader, and between author and history.; Also included in this dissertation is a volume of original poetry which echoes some of the formal questions of the essays. Its title, Litter, refers in one sense to the fragments and discarded bits which have been the focus of the critical section. Using excerpts from the notebooks and unpublished work of George Oppen, Ezra Pound, Paul Celan, and others, the poetry here provides another way of examining and resolving questions of form and fragment