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Partial arts: Poetic obsessions with the fragment

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Partial arts: Poetic obsessions with the fragment

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PARTIAL ARTS: POETIC OBSESSIONS WITH THE FRAGMENT

by

Andrew Allport

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING)

May 2010

Copyright 2010 Andrew Allport

ii

Epigraph

My system, if I may venture to give it so fine a name, is the only attempt I
know ever made to reduce all knowledges into harmony. It opposes no other
system, but shows what was true in each; and how that which was true in the
particular, in each of them became error, because it was only half the truth. I
have endeavoured to unite the insulated fragments of truth, and therewith to
frame a perfect mirror.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The fragment both is and is not System.
– Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy

You cannot erase.
Is this a law?
– Anne Carson
iii

Acknowledgements

Much of the intellectual work in this project was accomplished with the help
of my dissertation committee, and I wish to thank them all. Meg Russett, for
indispensable expertise on the Romantics; Mark Irwin, for unpredictable revelations
in the realms of art and beyond; Carol Muske-Dukes, for continual insistence on
clarity; Thomas Habinek, for advice on widening the scope of my arguments; and
David St. John, for boundless encouragement and counsel. This dissertation was
completed with a generous fellowship from the Literature and Creative Writing
Program at USC, whose support also allowed me summer travel and research funds.
Special thanks to Penny von Helmolt and Rich Edinger, for supporting my
development as a teacher in the Thematic Option department.
I also owe a debt of gratitude to numerous faculty and students who helped me
in ways too numerous to list during many years of teaching and writing. Without
them, I can‘t imagine what I might be trying to pass off as poetry and scholarship. I
also wish to thank the friends and poets who gave me advice on this manuscript in all
its versions: Amaranth Borsuk, Amy Meckler, Rachel Nelson, Rachel Richardson,
Rae Van Clief-Stefanon and Thomas Watson.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the editors of the publications in which
the following poems appeared, sometimes in different versions: ―Meditation Ending
with a Line by Celan‖ (The Antioch Review); ―An Unknown Shore‖ (ZYZZYVA, Best
New Poets 2006); ―The Professions of St. Augustine‖ (Crate); ―Postscript‖ (Colorado
iv

Review); ―Post-Tempest,‖ ―Don‘t Write At All,‖ ―The Papermakers‖ (Denver
Quarterly); ―Rae‘s Mask‖ (Blackbird). Many of these poems were published in the
chapbook The Ice Ship & Other Vessels (Denver: Proem Press, 2008).
v

Table of Contents

Epigraph ii
Acknowledgements iii
List of Figures vi
Abstract vii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: Romantic Fragments, Coleridge, and the Performance of Form 14
i. “Defect of undercurrent,” and other definitions 14
ii. What to make of the “mass of little things”? 33

Chapter 2: Making Piece with the Romantics 40
i. If it’s not broken, prefix it 40
ii. Incomplete, perfectly 45
iii. Imagined pinnacles and penises 53
iv. Disassembling the dissembling 57
v. Nothing lasts longer than ruins 59

Chapter 3: Penknifemanship: Fragments of Alteration and Excision 63
i. Reading the invisible 63
ii. “All were open’d”: Paradise rearranged 65
iii. No way to treat a book 70
iv. The past tense of Wite-Out is Out-Witted 79
v. Altars where it alteration finds 83
vi. Holey Bibles 88

Bibliography 91

Appendix A: Litter 95
i. Table of Contents 95
ii. Litter References 151

vi

List of Figures

Figure 1: Pages 38, 305 of A Humument (4th Edition). 72

Figure 2: Pages 257, 366 of A Humument (4th Edition). 73

Figure 3: Woodcut from Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Page 249 of
A Humument (4th Edition). 76

Figure 4: Pages 199, 183 of A Humument (4th Edition). 77

Figure 5: Title page of A Little White Shadow showing Mary
Ruefle‘s signature. 80

vii

Abstract

Through 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.
1

Introduction: Partial Arts

Consider three poets at work. The first labors for years over an epic poem, but
after his death the manuscript decays for centuries in a box; now only the first fifty
lines are legible. The second labors for a day over an epic, finishing just fifty lines
before abandoning it. The third goes to a bookseller‘s, where he finds a completed
epic for sale. Sitting down with a pair of scissors, he cuts out everything but the first
fifty lines. The resulting texts are each identical, but are they all the same? That is to
say, do we read them the same way, despite their authors‘ diverging intentions?
Fragment poems present a special set of problems for poetics. The very notion
of poetic form is a visible manifestation of order and rules in a text, but in the case of
the fragment, the attainment of form is dependent upon an invisible, lost, or imagined
part. The questions that attend the fragment are central to how we read and think
about form in poetry. In the hypothetical texts of the three poets above, for instance,
why would we fashion different reading practices for identical texts? The three
manuscripts are exactly the same; they are distinguishable only by what is not there.
Each is the remnant of some larger whole, but the quality of that whole is different in
each case.
The problem the fragment poses is, first and foremost, one of definition. At its
most basic, we might say a fragment is a work appreciated (or criticized) for what is
not there: connections, endings, contexts that seem to be pointedly missing from the
text. Sometimes textual indications point towards a beyond: the ellipsis that ends
Shelley‘s ―The Triumph of Life‖ or at the end of Pound‘s ―Papyrus‖ both refer the
2

reader to another plane of expression that helps make the poem intelligible. But their
ellipses, too, are different: Pound‘s are intentional, while Shelley‘s are the recourse of
the editor, since the manuscript was left unfinished when he drowned in the
Mediterranean. In another case, the hundreds of radically different translations of
Sappho show the vast range of possible combinations of legible text with symbolic
spacing and typography. One might safely say that what we are reading when we read
a fragment is, to a large extent, extratextual: Shelley‘s death is clearly ―in‖ the poem,
as is Pound‘s theory of Imagism, though neither fully completes them.
In fact, a key attraction of the fragment is its resistance to completion. Each of
our three fifty-line fragments might be the subject of biographical, historical, and
literary analysis, but without a complete text each analysis ends up in conjecture.
Because it calls upon extra-textual factors as well as readerly interpretation, the
fragment often illustrates the necessity of literary scholarship while simultaneously
exposing the limitations of its usefulness. No matter how much we know about the
poet—biography, historical context, influences—the poem remains incomplete,
delightfully.
It is possible, of course, to make basic distinctions between the operative
effects of different kinds of fragments: between collages and mosaics, for example,
which link and overlay a series of discrete parts, and the deliberately unfinished work,
whose lack of closure allows each reader her own imagined ending (and meaning).
But one of the glaring problems in describing fragments is the inherent symbolic
value of the form. The fragment is the only form which has both a literal definition
3

and a symbolic one—and in fact, its symbolism always threatens to prevail over
claims of literal incompletion. The fragment, unlike other forms, is always engaged in
a discussion of self-definition, so much so that a fragment poem‘s actual subject
matter is continually in danger of being appropriated by formal questions. One could
even say every fragment poem is, in some way, about form.
This combination of metaphorical valence and self-reflexivity, I think, often
leads critical studies of fragment poetry toward generalizations about the incomplete
nature of any poem, any act of communication, any attempt at understanding. A bit
paradoxically, studies in the fragment often lead to large-scale theorizations of poetry
itself, such as ―All poetry is fragment: it is shaped by its breakages, at every turn. It is
the very art of turnings, toward the white frame of the page, toward the unsung,
toward the vacancy made visible, that wordlessness in which our words are couched‖
(McHugh 75). Or: ―the fragment is a genre, beyond all genres and containing the
theory of genres and its own theory‖ (Lacoue-LaBarthe and Nancy 86). My feeling is:
all poetry may be fragment, but some poems are more broken than others. We must
examine the extent and intent of the breakage, since the question of fragmentation is
ultimately inextricable to how the poet conceives the whole.
Until this point I have made no distinctions between periods, but of course
such distinctions can be made: the Romantic fragment, the Modernist fragment, and
so on. But it seems impossible to articulate a single definition of the fragment without
acknowledging its inadequacy (the definition‘s, not the fragment‘s). You can‘t have a
fragment without a belief in form, but does it follow that the fragment is itself a form?
4

And if not, what is it, exactly? A genre, a practice, a fad? Was it found or invented?
Does it illustrate historicity, or timelessness? Should we insist on making distinctions
between fragments: deliberate or involuntary, sincere or ironic? Antique, Romantic,
Postmodern? And is it even possible to speak of fragments in an age where the
existence of any kind of whole is in doubt?
Perhaps the first thing we can say about it: the fragment is a form of questions,
not answers. This dissertation attempts to answer some, though not all, or even most,
of these questions. Through a series of interrelated fragment texts that include
Romantic and contemporary authors, I hope to illustrate both the genealogy and the
elasticity of the form. Moreover, I argue that the fragment continues to be the poetic
form by which the contemporary understands and reconstructs its past: as the
Romantic gazed at the Elgin Marbles, so does the contemporary consider the artifacts
of its literary past. But to accomplish this, the contemporary must first deface, erase,
and obscure them, rendering what was once intelligible mysterious, symbolic, and
incomplete. By reading the Romantic alongside the contemporary fragment poem
(that is, poems which have been consciously indicated by the author as a fragment),
as well as postmodern erasure texts and 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.
The deliberate writing and publication of fragment poetry is most closely
associated with the Romantics; in fact the fragment was the Romantic form par
excellence, refracting its preoccupations with unity, potentiality, ancient grandeur,
5

ideal form, beauty, system and chaos. The fragment can be—and has been—
contextualized within Romanticism‘s newfound historical consciousness, within its
idealization of the past, its fears of systemic destruction, its search for organic form,
and its anxiety over its imperfections. However, in the first section of this study I am
more interested in what happens to Romantic fragments after Romanticism—in
particular the way that collections and anthologies have reframed particular fragment
poems. In fact, one might even say that the notion of a poet‘s work as a ―collection‖
initiates a paradigm of fragments and organization, in which the poet is in need of a
collector to do the tagging and categorization of his poems. At least, such is the case
in the first chapter, which is concerned with the reception and collection of the
fragment poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I am interested here in the modes of
criticism provoked by the fragment poems, as well as the poems themselves. In
restoring the fragment poems to their original contexts—some highly mediated by
prefaces and notes, some meant to be read as part of a series of fragments—I hope to
demonstrate how the gradual exclusion of these surrounding materials has affected
our sense of the form, which is ―always to be understood in the plural, as constituted
by at least two or more fragments‖ (Stratham 43). To the extent that it is possible to
forge a definition of ―fragment‖ according to Coleridge, I attempt in this first chapter
to give a sense of how his strategy of ―collected fragments‖ arose from a deep
ambivalence about formal unity, but which allowed him to achieve a form of
simultaneous achievement and critique. The original form of ―Kubla Khan,‖ like the
later Sibylline Leaves, is carefully intended to escape accusations of failure by
6

preemptively claiming failure as its form. In doing so, the poem never reveals
whether this failure has been the goal all along. The metaphor of the broken mirror,
which appears in the epigraph to ―Kubla Khan‖ (taken from an earlier poem called
―The Picture, or, The Lover‘s Resolution‖) as well as in Coleridge‘s planned
philosophical opus, is never clearly articulated. The broken mirror functions as an
image of distrust of unity as well as beauty, as Coleridge (and his poetry) can‘t seem
to decide whether the unbroken mirror is preferable to the broken one: one reflects an
ideal, the other reality.
Fittingly, critical studies of Coleridge are often an echo of one description of
his grand philosophical project ―to unite the insulated fragments of truth, and
therewith to frame a perfect mirror.‖ The irony of these intentions is that systematic
explanations of fragments inevitably give them coherence and unity. A typical effort
was Kenneth Burke‘s planned explication of everything every written by Coleridge, a
galactic map that would track the use and significance of each adjective, metaphor,
and symbol. More reductively, Walter Pater claimed that everything Coleridge wrote
was an elaboration on the distinction between Imagination and Fancy. Even today,
when it comes to explaining the inchoate nature of Coleridge‘s work, critics fall into
totalizing generalities or arbitrary classifications: either everything leads back to one
central philosophical or poetic problem, or to a series of semi-structuralist
categorizations which make organization itself a kind of explanation.
Part of the difficulty surely lies in the quantity and diversity of Coleridge‘s
material. His Collected Works is a twelve volume universe that includes every line of
7

writing that could possibly be deserving of collection and an equal number that are
not. There are generic divisions in these volumes—poetry, plays, non-fiction and so
on—but the further one reads, the more the question of genre appears to be an
insidious imposition which the work seems designed to expose: Biographia Literaria,
with its diverging strands of biography and criticism; ―Kubla Khan,‖ dismissed by its
own author as mere ―psychological curiosity;‖ the multiple, competing versions of
―The Rime of the Ancient Mariner‖—these, some of the most famous poems in the
English language, have no real generic precedent, nor antecedents. And as one
disappears into the more obscure corners of the Collected Works—journals, letters,
marginalia, table talk, errata—formal and generic expectations give way altogether,
and one is left with the sense that every piece of text must be significant, no matter
how recondite or fragmentary. Perhaps one might call this the Collected Fallacy—the
assumption that all works by an author‘s hand in some way connect to each other. As
Michel Foucault observes, the very notion of a collection under the banner of a single
author‘s name
serves to neutralize the contradictions that may emerge in a series of texts...the
author is a particular source of expression that, in more or less completed
forms, is manifested equally well, and with similar validity, in works,
sketches, letters, fragments, and so on. (Foucault 215)

This fallacy, in turn, encourages us to explain the manner of this supposed
connection, to find a logic binding the disparate parts, to build a system where one is
absent. The fragment, as I argue, provides systemic connections whose frailties help
us to see the frailty of the system itself.
8

The second chapter, ―Afterlives of the Fragment Form,‖ is an examination of
the continued use of the self-consciously incomplete poem as a form. In a series of
twentieth-century examples, form itself provides a kind of Romantic allusion, though
not without a degree of irony. In a larger sense, this section is an inquiry into the way
contemporary poets allude to, characterize, and satirize Romantic ideology,
particularly its love of the fragment. There is something quite ambivalent about this
relationship, which sends up the Romantic naiveté that produced the fragment, but at
the same arrive at similar conclusions about the impossibility of grasping the whole.
Embedded in this ambivalence is the desire to break away from—and perhaps
literally break—the Romantics. The Keats that appears in the work of Anne Carson
and Brenda Hillman, for example, is an almost Sapphic figure whose work is broken,
mysterious, incomplete. His poems are literally fragmented, creating a loss of context
that echoes Keats‘s own encounter with the unknowable Grecian urn or the broken
frieze of the Parthenon. This breakage is perhaps partly desire to escape the influence
of the Romantics, and partly to stage a scene that is itself recognizable from
Romanticism: the poet‘s encounter with the unfinished or fragmented work—Rilke‘s
―Archaic Torso of Apollo‖ comes to mind—whose lacking elements blaze more
brightly than what is there.
In the final chapter, I focus on texts that have been physically fragmented,
altered, and excised to create new poems, including the work of Ronald Johnson,
Tom Phillips, Jen Bervin, and Mary Ruefle. Though not published as ―fragments‖ per
se, these works nonetheless depend on the reader‘s understanding of some larger
9

whole from which the current text arose. They also depend upon a process of
inescapable allusion to the text from which they were cut, and any understanding of a
particular altered text begins with this relationship of the fragment to the whole—
what is missing, in other words, must be read carefully. My interest here is how
differences in the source text and differences in compositional technique create a new
set of concerns for each project. How does working within a canonical text like
Paradise Lost or Shakespeare‘s sonnets affect the project—and our interaction with
it—differently than an obscure pamphlet? What kinds of poetic and artistic values are
implicit in each of these endeavors? In a series of interconnected readings, I examine
the altered text and the altered book in terms of their definitions of value, authorship,
and originality. In particular, I question how the poetics of the altered text might be
extended outside of the act of writing (or erasing, as it were). That is, how does this
genre help us think about the artist‘s relationship to the world?
A comparison to earlier fragments is useful here. Romantic fragments
referenced a whole that had evaporated, or remained unavailable or unobtainable but
might at a later moment be realized. The Modernist fragment was a demonstration of
poetic economy, and ultimately its conception of the whole was, to use Eliot‘s
formulation describing The Waste Land, ―a heap of broken images.‖ Ann Janowitz
phrases the distinction between Romanticism and Modernism as ―a partial whole and
a whole made of parts.‖ But each of these wholes are poetic gestures meant to be
statements about the world outside the poem, as when Pound admits ―I cannot make it
cohere‖ at the end of the Cantos—though it is perhaps most true of the poem itself, it
10

is an admission that goes beyond poetic form. In the case of the altered text, it seems
unclear to me if ―the whole‖ offers a synecdoche for the world, since the whole,
whether Paradise Lost or a little-known Victorian novel, is still a whole text. Perhaps
these works intend to dramatize the sense of fragmented readerly attention toward the
text. They are, in some sense, representations of the distracted, half-attentive reading
which is our default setting for moving through most of the text we encounter.
Alternately, as been suggested by Craig Dworkin, the altered text is an act of
resistance against the dominant model of reading-as-receiving. By disrupting our
normal reading procedures and habits, they demand to be read with close attention,
and more importantly, with a kind of participation, unsettling the model of reading as
passive reception.
There are a number of traditions in which I might have situated the
contemporary texts of this study. The influence of the Moderns, except for a passing
mention in discussing Ronald Johnson, is not been emphasized as much as it might
have been. For a more complete discussion on the influences of John Cage, Jackson
Mac Low, Charles Olson and William Burroughs on the altered text, I suggest
Reading the Illegible by Craig Dworkin and the brilliant essays on those poets by
Marjorie Perloff. Certainly one could argue that Anne Carson and Brenda Hillman‘s
poetry owes more to Gertrude Stein than Keats, and Lucie Brock-Broido more to
Wallace Stevens than Coleridge. But my interest is not so much about tonal influence
as formal inference—that is, the way a form suggests its own history every time it is
re-used—and the way that these contemporary poets respond specifically to
11

Romanticism in form and content. Others have situated these texts—particularly the
work of Tom Phillips—within the tradition of ―artists‘ books,‖ a form almost as loose
as the fragment. This tradition is often described as originating with the illuminated
printing of William Blake, but has fully come into its own in the twentieth century as
a form preferred by multiple Modernisms, including Italian and Russian Futurism as
well as Dada, and later by the mid-century avant-garde. With notable exceptions, the
study of artists‘ books is typically interested more in the aesthetics of the visual
experience, not the poetics of the literature.
1
And though the visual experience of
many of the works here is incorporated as a supplement, my primary critical
vocabulary is drawn from literary, not visual culture, since my investigation of the
fragment form is as an incomplete text.
Finally, there are traditions where the materiality of the fragment demands
special attention: torn and decayed papyrus manuscripts, broken tablets, and
palimpsests all confront the reader with a literal sense of fragmentation that can be
compared fruitfully to the effects of more metaphorical fragments. Heather McHugh
has noted the similarity of altered books to the materially fragmented work of
Empedocles, pointing out how both texts confront the reader with texts that contain
an intrinsic sense of a ―time differential‖ in which we see the author‘s original intent
as well as the interception or intercession of it. For some of the poets in this study, the
sense of physical fragmentation is key, since it gets to the heart of the interaction they
want to stage between reader and text. A material sense of breakage informs the

1
For a full sense of this tradition‘s diversity, Johanna Drucker‘s The Century of Artists’ Books
(Granary Books, 1995) is invaluable.
12

poetry of Anne Carson, a translator of Sappho and Alkman who often combines
Greek lyric fragments with her own poetry. Carson notes that she is less interested in
accuracy in her translations than in replicating the effect of actually reading a torn and
incomplete document; to this end, some poems consist entirely of brackets, half-
words, and white space. Such a poetics ends up equating the intentional process of
composition to the random process of decomposition; getting rid of the poet‘s sense
of intentionality in favor of accident and randomness. Such a tradition claims to be
―not merely resigned to accident: I am committed to it‖ (McHugh 77). In the final
chapter of this dissertation, I ask whether such a project can ever be the product of a
singular poet, or if fragmentation must always take place at the hands of another
agent.
It should be clear from the previous paragraphs that the following is not
intended as a complete study of cultural fascination with the topoi of incompletion.
Like Sibylline Leaves, the collection of texts here are themselves ―widely scattered
and fragmentary,‖ from an illustrated sixteenth-century Venetian romanzo d’amore to
a novella written to raise funds for the working poor of industrial Massachusetts.
Which is to say their differences would surely outweigh an effort to construe them as
a kind of tradition, at least in the traditional sense of that word. And perhaps any
effort to build a tradition out of a form which is itself defined by what it is not—
complete, whole, finished—is a bit quixotic. Attempting to construe the fragment as a
tradition, then, requires a paradoxical faith in the ability and importance of form to
the reader, and a certain faith in the endurance of certain poetic struggles between
13

form and formlessness. After all, what looks like a fragment today could just as
easily, or as accurately, be called an example of a wholesale abandonment of form.
But, as I hope to make clear in the following pages, the abandonment of form is never
complete, and in fact fragment poems are the ideal way to dramatize the shortcomings
of form.

14

Chapter 1: Romantic Fragments, Coleridge, and the Performance of Form

i. “Defect of undercurrent,” and other definitions
Where does the love of the fragment poem begin? Though it is most often
conceived as a creation of early Romanticism, Leonard Barkin, in Unearthing the
Past, has argued convincingly that the deliberate creation and appreciation of
fragments as fragments was an aesthetic practice as early as the Italian Renaissance:
―The non finito is not a mere romantic anachronism but a real expression of early
modern artistic culture‖ (207). Other scholars have suggested that the Romantic
fragment poem is formally part of a mixed genre that goes back at least to Petrarch,
and includes Sterne and Diderot as predecessors, especially of such long and
digressive fragments as Byron‘s The Giaour (Harries 371). In a fundamental sense,
however, the fragment as we know it today—that is to say, as we read it today—
begins with that most ingenious fragment, Samuel Taylor Coleridge‘s ―Kubla Khan.‖
―Kubla Khan‖ is both a dream and a fragment, according to its title. As a
fragment, it is the most famous fragment of the Romantic period and perhaps the
most famous fragment poem in the English literary canon, and is understood to be the
predecessor (if not the originator) of a form that includes Keats‘s ―Hyperion,‖
Wordsworth‘s ―The Danish Boy,‖ Byron‘s Don Juan and Shelley‘s ―The Triumph of
Life,‖ all of which, like ―Kubla Khan,‖ were described as ―fragments‖ upon
publication. As a dream, ―Kubla Khan‖ has become a collective one of which
15

―everything is known…except what it is about,‖ as George Watson put it nearly forty
years ago. As it turns out, much more has been written about ―Kubla Khan,‖ and the
Romantic fragment poetry in general since then, adding to our knowledge if not our
understanding of this enigmatic form: The Unfinished Manner, The Fragmentary
Imperative, The Forms of Ruin, The Form of the Unfinished, to name a few.
2
In
adding a few observations of my own, then, I am participating in a long, unbroken
line of appreciative bewilderment that dates back to the publication of ―Kubla Khan‖
in 1816, and even before that, when Coleridge began reciting the poem to friends
shortly after its composition in September of 1797.
Or, depending on which account one believes, October of 1798. In his
prefatory note Coleridge himself puts it at ―the summer of the year 1797,‖ though this
claim is disputed in many accounts. In any event, we might observe that historical
ambiguity seems to suit the poem‘s purposes, taking place as it does in a kind of
timeless landscape, blending past and present, its voice both third- to first-person, the
cool tones of description giving way to visionary terror.
Many critical studies of ―Kubla Khan‖ delineate terms of study at their outset
that willfully look past the idea of the poem as a fragment, preferring to point out the
authorial contrivance inherent to this description. It is as though the term ―fragment,‖
so perfect a metaphor for other aspects of the poem, cannot also be a factual
description of its form. In previous treatments of ―Kubla Khan,‖ the poem is made

2
Though most of my response in this chapter is to Levinson and MacFarland, these titles are meant as
an indication of the number of studies on the fragment; by listing them together I want to illustrate the
appropriately enigmatic quality of their titles.
16

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 begins his study with the statement ―Kubla Khan...is as fully
terminated as any poem in the language‖ (225). Therefore, its fragmentariness must
be construed 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 convincingly
illustrates both the power and the shortcomings of such an approach.
3
In large part,
his analysis relies on the idea that aesthetic value is equivalent to completion, so that
if Coleridge‘s poem is to be held up as a great poem, it must by definition be ―fully
terminated,‖ which, though sinister-sounding, is high praise. But the most astonishing
aspect of ―Kubla Khan‖ is precisely its opposition to the way we think aesthetic
poetry should sound and feel, even after all these years, however many they are. The
incompleteness of the poem, even if rooted in the author‘s biography, is not primarily
experienced by readers as biographical, but as poetic, as gesture, as form.
In his analysis MacFarland takes pains to distinguish the ―poem‖ from
―poetry.‖ Formal analysis, he argues, limits us to seeing only the limited ―poem‖ and
not the larger poetic act which constitutes ―poetry.‖ In some ways, ―Kubla Khan‖ is

3
McFarland sees no paradox in praising Coleridge‘s fragment as both ―terminated‖ and symbolic of
what he calls the ―diasparactive triad‖ of ―incompletion, fragmentation and ruin‖ that characterize
Romantic thought (and, in his estimation, the lives of the Romantics). I discuss the implications of this
paradox below.
17

the ideal illustration of this distinction: Coleridge wrote a poem called ―Kubla Khan,‖
but his larger poetic act includes the events of its composition (opium dream,
deferred), recitation, and publication. The poetry takes off where the text of the poem
ends, it would seem. But then where exactly does the poem even begin; what parts of
its text constitute the poem? Coleridge‘s original preface includes not only an
explanation of the poem‘s composition but an excerpt from another poem (―The
Picture, or, The Lover‘s Resolution‖) and, by way of balance, an additional ―fragment
of a very different character‖ (―The Pains of Sleep‖). The excerpt itself is a fragment,
whose original intention is subverted in its presentation here. According to
Coleridge, ―The Picture, or, The Lover‘s Resolution,‖ composed years after ―Kubla
Khan,‖ was an attempt ―to emancipate the soul from day-dreams‖ (Notebooks
1:1153). It is Coleridge‘s attempt at allegorical romance: a semi-mocking portrayal
of a youth lost in a semi-magical wood; an enchantment with the natural world
followed by a chase of a mysterious female figure he sees reflected in a pool. The
actual ―picture‖ of the poem‘s title is painted by this female figure, who leaves it
behind as a tantalizing clue.
Putting the ―The Picture‖ beside ―Kubla Khan‖ illustrates by juxtaposition the
difficulty of writing a poem without a dream, not to mention the impossibility of
being both dreamer and critic of dreams in the same poem. Both poems contain a
vision of an elusive and artistic woman—―A damsel with a dulcimer‖ and ―The Naiad
of the Mirror‖—whose ―symphony and song‖ and ―curious picture,‖ respectively, are
left behind for the speaker. But the ending of ―The Picture‖ is as pedestrian and
18

pedantic as ―Kubla Khan‖ is provocative and mysterious: the youth hurries down the
path ―that leads straightaway / To her father‘s house‖ in order to return the picture left
behind by the naiad, which if kept would only ―idly feed / The passion that consumes
me. Let me haste!‖ (181-84). Morally and tonally, this ending expresses a desire to
control the temptations of imagination, rather than, as in the end of ―Kubla Khan,‖ an
illustration of their power:
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice;
And close your eyes with holy dread:
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drank the milk of Paradise. (48-53)

The intended moral lesson in ―Kubla Khan,‖ if there is one, is overcome by the
captivation under the spell of art. We should cry beware, but art‘s charm is that we
do not. We come near; we close our eyes, we listen. The work of art, as shown by
the narrative of ―The Picture,‖ heightens the hunger for that mysterious object;
Coleridge would have us believe that the correct action is to renounce it, return it to
―her father‘s house.‖ But the poem‘s weakness seems to be intimately connected with
this intended moral lesson: to modulate ―The passion that consumes‖ may be the
proper thing to do, morally speaking, but it makes for a duller poem. Coleridge
himself felt ―The Picture‖ was deficient, and noted in Francis Wrangham‘s copy of
Sibylline Leaves that ―In this poem there is no defect of connection…But there is no
under-current, that ‗moves onward from within‘‖ (CW 16.1.2: ).

19

In the preface to ―Kubla Khan,‖ the lines Coleridge extracts from ―The
Picture‖ follow the youth‘s glimpse of a Naiad of the Mirror, whose image he sees
reflected in a still pool. As he beholds ―the stately virgin‘s robe, / The face, the form
divine‖ (line 74-5) and ―[w]orships the watery idol, dreaming hopes / Delicious to the
soul, but fleeting, vain‖ (line 83-4), the maiden throws a handful of flowers upon the
surface (and here begins the preface to ―Kubla Khan‖:
Then all the charm
Is broken—all that phantom-world so fair
Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,
And each mis-shape each other. Stay awhile,
Poor youth! who scarcely dar‘est lift up thine eyes—
The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon
The visions will return! And lo, he stays,
And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms
Come trembling back, unite, and now once more
The pool becomes a mirror. (91-100)

In the complete poem, the naiad disappears, and in a moment that recalls Keats‘s
knight in ―La belle dame sans merci,‖ the narrator warns the ―ill-fated youth‖ not to
―waste thy manly prime / In mad Love-yearning by the vacant brook, / Till sickly
thoughts bewitch thine eyes‖ (107-9). But this warning is excluded from the preface.
As a result, the excerpt from ―The Picture‖ can be logically read by readers as
further illustration of the poet‘s story of composition, with Coleridge playing the part
of the ―[P]oor youth,‖ still waiting for the recollection of the poem‘s ―lovely forms‖
after being interrupted. And the repetition of the word ―form‖ seems to be expressly
making an argument, or at least providing an illustration, of a compositional process
that Coleridge is trying to renounce, or at least denounce. Like Narcissus, he is
20

trapped by the beauty of his ―hopes / Delicious to the soul, but fleeting, vain‖—the
ambiguity of the last word is a comment on both the merit and character of the youth
as poet. The great distinction in Biographia Literaria between Fancy and Imagination
(Walter Pater claims in his appreciation of Coleridge that everything he wrote was an
elaboration on this distinction) is illustrated in this scene, with the youth given over to
―counterfeit memory,‖ that product of Fancy, as he stares into the pool.
Tellingly, in recasting this scene as the loss of a poem rather than a woman,
Coleridge reverses his original intent in ―The Picture‖ of emancipation from day-
dreams: instead of emancipation, it now reads as enslavement, or more appropriately,
addiction. All of the negative qualities of the ―ill-fated youth,‖ including ―sickly‖ and
―mad,‖ become those of the poet waiting in vain for the return of his vision. This may
have been the reason Coleridge also included ―The Pains of Sleep,‖ described in the
introduction as ―a fragment of a very different character, describing with equal
fidelity the dream of pain and disease,‖ a description whose tone and language seem
calibrated toward balancing the two.
But what did Coleridge mean by ―fragment‖? He is happily inconsistent. The
first is as an antonym to form. In ―The Picture,‖ the youth sees ―the fragments dim of
lovely forms‖ reflected in the rippling mirror of the stream. Earlier, the mysterious
naiad is described as ―the form divine.‖ Within the narrative of the poem, the loss of
his vision is also a loss of her form, and of form in general. In this sense, fragment is
the loss of form. But in characterizing ―The Pains of Sleep‖ and ―Kubla Khan‖ as
fragments, Coleridge suggests that the fragment may itself be a form. In fact,
21

Coleridge‘s fragments seem to be illustrating the formal characteristic of the fragment
poem, which is a sense of dependency: upon other fragments surrounding it, on an
extensive back-story, framing ―Kubla Khan‖ not as a poem, but as part of a narrative
and complex ethical debate over the usefulness of dreams and daydreams; one of
many items in a psychological curiosity shoppe. This characteristic itself is slippery,
since we might just as easily say that the preface creates this appearance of
dependency, or that such a formal quality is impossible to equate with a single
poem—how could we recognize dependency without at least two dependent objects?
To break this aporia, an easier question is this: if they were originally intended as co-
dependent, what kind of preference is shown by the editorial practice, common in
most anthologies, of singling out the text beginning ―In Xanadu‖ and ending with
―Paradise‖ as the poem ―Kubla Khan‖? In an odd reversal, the less we see of
Coleridge‘s attempts to contextualize it, the more whole ―Kubla Khan‖ appears. The
interconnectedness of the series of fragments is severed; in their place is a Great
Poem, ―fully terminated as any in the English language,‖ as MacFarland claims—but
terminated by whom, we might ask?
MacFarland has a rather difficult explanation of how a fragment poem
becomes finished. According to his argument, a poem consists of two separate
factors: substantia and essentia. Substantia, in his definition, covers ―not only stanza
form, not only meter and rhyme, not only the semantic references of the words in the
poem, not only the sense of beginning and end, but also the statement of the poem‖
(273). Enjambments, allusions, metaphor, story—in fact ―almost everything that
22

formalist theory has to say about poetry‖ is included in substantia (274). But
formalist theory, in McFarland‘s estimation, does not account for the essentia of
poetry; the ―feeling of the whole of our existence in its cloven reality‖ which is
characteristic, he claims, of all worthwhile poetry. Keats‘s ―On seeing the Elgin
Marbles‖ provides perhaps the best poetic example: the speaker‘s ―indescribable
feud‖ between the sharpness of present perception and the awareness of mortality that
this perception invites: the ―dizzy pain, / That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
/ Wasting of old time‖ (10-12). Or, put more simply, poetic essentia is Keats‘s
ending phrase: ―a shadow of a magnitude.‖
Though McFarland seems to gesture toward parity between his terms, he is
primarily interested in the evanescence of essentia, which ―must be present in all
poetry that merits the name‖ (281). In fact, in an unexpected turn, he argues that the
formal aspects of a poem, not the fleeting lyric feeling, are what characterize it as a
fragment, or ―a configuration of words torn out of the vast mine of linguistic
possibility‖ (280). By this definition, all poetry—in fact, all written work—is a
fragment in this sense, since it cannot simultaneously be arranged more than one way.
In my opinion, this definition forms the last arc of a circle of reasoning that is also an
elaborate shell game: after first denying the fragmentariness of ―Kubla Khan,‖
McFarland simply expands the definition of ―fragment‖ so that finished poems may
be included once again. When ―fragment‖ is applied in this most abstract sense, the
question of finished or unfinished, terminated or living, is—if it wasn‘t already—
irrelevant.
23

Yet Marjorie Levinson, in her book-length study of Romantic fragment
poems, makes a compelling case for the relevance of this question. That we read
―Kubla Khan‖ as a complete poem is, for Levinson, proof that our reading is affecting
the work as much as it affects us:
Kubla Khan contains all the elements necessary to a ‗written‘ or achieved
poem; it lacks only the interstitial material…serious readers of the poem have
always and unconsciously supplied this material. They fill in the blanks and
credit the poem with the closure which their labor produces. (113)

According to Levinson, before the Romantic fragment taught readers to read
incompleteness correctly—to ―fill in the blanks and credit the poem with the
closure‖—essentia would seem not to have existed as an artistic value, or at least not
as one that readers would be able to recognize. Levinson sees the publication of
fragment poems as a watershed moment in the relationship between poets and
readers, when the demands of form began to include the active participation in the
process of making a poem, or at least making it whole. By inferring competence on
the part of its readers, Levinson argues, the Romantic fragment enacted a poetic
paradigm shift, presenting to readers the poem as a poetic act always in need of
reading in order to become poetry. And only ―serious readers‖—that is, critics—are
capable of this kind of reading. The romantic fragment poem, then, represents a sui
generis relationship between poet and critics: no wonder it has enjoyed such attention
from the latter; it was written for them, and made possible their role as explicators
with its need for explanations.
24

This is a compelling argument, and less abstracted than MacFarland‘s
neologisms, but it is complicated by the fact that ―Kubla Khan‖ comes with its own
explication. In this case, it is the poet here who also acts as critic, who attempts to fill
the blanks and give context to the poetry, telling readers how the poem should be read
in the context of the author‘s life, work, and thematic concerns (as ―psychological
curiosity,‖ as one-half of a diptych with ―Pains of Sleep,‖ as a further example of the
distinctions between imagination and fancy posed in ―The Picture‖). Explanations are
actually here in abundance, if only we could trust them. But the artfulness of the
fragment makes trusting it impossible; every piece of explication is part of the work.
As such, they are in need of explanations themselves. Perhaps the real paradigm shift
of the fragment poem is not only a new necessity of critical reading, but a sense that
any explanation of a work of art leaves room for another.
Creativity and self-critique are the dominant forces of Coleridge‘s fragments,
both in the prose and the poems themselves. The dominant impression of ―Kubla
Khan‖ is less lack of closure than an internal fracture between the initial vision of
Khan‘s pleasure dome and the second vision, similar to that of the youth in ―The
Picture,‖ of an ―Abyssinian maid.‖ In other words, what needs explanation is not the
ending, but the fissure between line 36 and 37, between the voice that culminates with
―A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!‖ and the one which seems to begin a new
poem, opening with ―A damsel with a dulcimer / In a vision once I saw.‖ Between
these is the ―interstitial material‖ that Levinson rightly claims is missing from the
poem, and which readers have supplied. Has it been this damsel singing about Kubla
25

all along? Is this now the voice of a commentator or a visionary? Shifting into the
first person, the speaker wishes for the recovery of his vision—―Could I revive within
me / Her symphony and song‖— while at the same time describing how frightening it
would be to others:
Weave a circle round him twice,
And close your eyes in holy dread—
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drank the milk of paradise. (41-42, 50-54)

It is fitting that the last lines of the poem are spoken by the speaker‘s audience; even
more so that this audience is already providing an explanation for his poem and a
critique of its creator. Yet both audience and poet are the same person; in ―Kubla
Khan‖ we see the push and pull of creative and critical impulses that were both
generative and impedimentary to Coleridge‘s writing.
However, it is less accurate to read ―Kubla Khan‖ as self-critique than as one
half of a self-critiquing diptych, along with ―Pains of Sleep.‖ That is, we wouldn‘t
read the self-condemnation in ―Kubla Khan‖ without both the story of the preface and
the agony of ―Pains of Sleep,‖ which appeared in the 1816 publication as ―a fragment
of a very different character, describing with equal fidelity the dream of pain and
disease‖ (CW 512). The phrase ―equal fidelity,‖ given the doubt surrounding the
truthfulness of the rest of the prefatory note, is interesting. But the equation of the
two poems is unmistakable: they are opposing, equivalent, characterized as two sides
of the same experience. Whereas ―Kubla Khan‖ begins with an unmediated vision of
an exotic landscape and only later develops a speaker, the visions in ―The Pains of
26

Sleep‖ are of an emotional landscape which the speaker can‘t escape: an early draft,
enclosed in a letter to Robert Southey, describes the state as a ―self-created hell
within‖ (CL 2:990).
As a counterpoint to ―Kubla Khan,‖ ―The Pains of Sleep‖ illustrates the
difficulty of composing about dreams, rather than in them. There are no fruitful
visions here, only ―Fantastic passions! Mad‘ning brawl! / And shame and terror over
all!‖ (25). At best, the speaker achieves a Zen-like state of meditation instead of
sleep: ―No wish conceived, no though expressed! / Only a sense of supplication‖ (9).
Three irregularly rhyming and lengthening stanzas parallel the three lengthening
nights the speaker lies awake, tortured by his own actions (―Deeds to be hid which
were not hid,‖) until he wakes and weeps, realizing his own nature is ―deepliest
stain‘d with sin‖ (27, 44). At the end of the poem, the anguished speaker asks why
such a burden has fallen on him (―wherefore, wherefore fall on me?‖) and by way of
an answer, gives a statement: ―To be beloved is all I need, / And whom I love, I love
indeed‖ (50-52). It is not a paradox to call the ending of the poem both an addendum
and a truncation: the final two couplets extend the stanza four lines longer than the
preceding one, yet the question is deliberately and obviously elided by the banality of
the answer.
In terms of composition and form, ―The Pains of Sleep‖ has none of the
formally fragmentary elements of ―Kubla Khan.‖ It is not the remnant of a larger
work, nor does the author intend to ―finish for himself what had been originally, as it
were, given,‖ as Coleridge writes in the introduction to ―Kubla Khan.‖ It does not
27

even have a shift in speaker, or in mood. It is, in other words, perfectly
comprehensible. If there really is something like a consistent definition of the
fragment form, the dissimilarities between these two must be either reconciled or
willfully suspended. Or, to return to Levinson‘s idea of the ―serious reader‖ who
unconsciously completes ―Kubla Khan,‖ we might posit an opposite effect in ―The
Pains of Sleep,‖ whereby the serious reader would have to find a kind of
incompleteness in the poem to justify its form. MacFarland suggests, in a metaphoric-
biographical, that the incompleteness of the poem is actually found in the life of its
author. Having attempted to quit ―all opitates except ether be one, and that only in
fits,‖ and having recently sent ―a scrap of a letter‖ to Sara Hutchinson, Coleridge
composed ―The Pains of Sleep‖ over a period of eight days of walking, with little
sleep. The poem, in this scheme, is part of a biographical context that interprets
poetry as equivalent to other facts (as long as it fits).
This is a fair argument, but all of its interpretive directions are bound to point
toward fracture and ruin. In the end, it reiterates the special way that a fragment
poem, simply by being called a ―fragment,‖ and without obvious characteristics of
fragmentation, is always dependent upon something else for meaning. Ultimately, we
might see the numerous poems Coleridge published as ―fragments‖ as representative
of a performance of form, rather than a form themselves. The tension in any form is
in its interplay between poetic freedom and convention, but in the case of the
fragment, conventions are infinitely mutable. In the fragments of 1816, as well as the
five from Sibylline Leaves—―The Foster Mother‘s Tale,‖ ―The Night-Scene,‖ ―The
28

Happy Husband,‖ ―Melancholy,‖ and ―Human Life‖—Coleridge gives little
clarification of the fragment, but does suggest its elasticity. Of course, these are the
3crucial poems of the volume, since they carry out the author‘s central metaphor for
the collection, which Coleridge describes as ―fragmentary and widely scattered‖ in
his preface.
There are, it must be said, distinct differences in reasoning for calling each a
fragment. The ―dramatic‖ fragments ―The Foster Mother‘s Tale‖ and ―The Night-
Scene‖ are taken from longer plays (Osorio and the unfinished The Triumph of
Loyalty, respectively). ―Human Life‖ and ―Melancholy‖ are two different attempts at
imitation: ―Human Life‖ of Donne and ―Melancholy‖ of Chatterton. Both of these,
Coleridge indicates, were to be part of a larger project but were abandoned. And then
there is ―The Happy Husband,‖ an odd poem which seems not to fit any of the
previously established formal conventions of the fragment. Coleridge made only
minimal alterations to ―The Happy Husband‖ in later editions; there are no records of
attempting to finish or add to it substantially, no preface detailing its lost context, or
anything in his letters or notebooks to suggest there was ever more to the poem.
Unlike the earlier fragments he had published, it is not a dramatic scene taken out of
its dramatic context nor part of a planned, grander poem (―The Destiny of Nations,‖
for example). Rather, it is a dense piece of emotional philosophy, told from the point
of view of a speaker who encodes his unhappiness in a description of happiness.
Because there are apparently no other reasons to make it a fragment, ―The Happy
Husband‖ marks the emergence of a new form, one we might call the intended
29

fragment, where the reader must search within the poem for the source of its
incompletion. In this it is most similar to ―Pains of Sleep,‖ that ―fragment of a
different character‖ meant to be read after ―Kubla Khan.‖ Here, a quality which had
hitherto been understood as a more or less a formal truth becomes both truth and
metaphor: ―The Happy Husband‖ demands that the reader see ―fragment‖ as
symbolic of the emotional life of its speaker, and the poem as a discrete but ultimately
incomplete expression of that life.
The language of the poem is a series of emotional contradictions, so that in
describing happiness the speaker exposes his profound misery. Its first stanza is a
kind of meditation on names, one of Coleridge‘s favorite intellectual topics. The
speaker is calling on both the given name of his wife (―thy dear / And dedicated
name‖), as well as the name ―Wife,‖ which carries within it ―A promise and a
mystery, / A pledge of passing life‖ (2-3, 5-6). Oddly, the utterance of ―Wife‖ brings
up a series of ambiguous comparisons: ―happiness‖ recalls a ―desert,‖ while
―gladness half requests to weep‖ (9-10). Love, in this poem‘s relationship, is not
soothing or reassuring but ―A feeling that upbraids the heart‖ (8). Another
characterization, ―Love‘s brooding wing,‖ is the homophonic combination of the
speaker‘s two states of mind: an incubating, protective instinct over his family and an
introspective resentment at this responsibility (15). Love is contrasted with ―joys,‖
which ―wheel out their giddy moment, then / Resign the soul to love again‖ (16-17).
However, it is never clear which of the two the speaker prefers—the transient but
carefree feeling of joy, or the deeper but painful feeling of love. In the fourth stanza,
30

this problem is resolved, or at least concluded, with an image (technically, both an
image and a sound):
A more precipitated vein
Of notes, that eddy in the flow
Of smoothest song, they come, they go,
And leave their sweeter understrain
Its own sweet self—a love of Thee
That seems, yet cannot greater be! (18-24)

By attempting to reconcile these two emotions with a musical metaphor, Coleridge is
also making a statement about the experience of art, as well as consciousness. The
actual image is not only a musical but natural metaphor: like a song, a stream is
layered, with different currents moving in different directions, but always with an
―under-current,‖ one of Coleridge‘s recurrent metaphors for poetry. Criticizing ―The
Picture,‖ he writes, ―In this poem there is no defect of connection…But there is no
under-current, that ‗moves onward from within‘‖ (CW 16.1.2: 711). In contrast, ―The
Happy Husband‖ seems to be all currents and little connection. Whereas ―The
Picture, or The Lover‘s Resolution‖ offers a clear moral decision at its end, in ―The
Happy Husband‖ we come away uncertain of whether the last description of a love—
―That seems, yet cannot greater be!‖—is an affirmation or a cry of despair.
―The Happy Husband‖ is in the ―Love Poems‖ section of Sibylline Leaves,
though its treatment of matrimony is not what we expect from its title. ―Recollections
of Love,‖ the poem that follows it, echoes its complex characterizations of love,
describing it as ―A dream remember‘d in a dream‖ and ―Dear under-song in Clamor‘s
hour‖ (29-30). Both diction and theme are familiar from earlier poems, particularly
31

other fragment poems: the dream within a dream is reminiscent of the dream-
composition of ―Kubla Khan,‖ while the ―under-song,‖ like the Coleridgean
neologism ―understrain‖ from ―The Happy Husband,‖ describes what the speaker
hears, or imagines hearing, below the clamor of his reality: music that is constant,
unbroken and somewhat clandestine—only audible ―when other voices sleep.‖ A
similar version of this scene occurs in an unpublished fragment in Coleridge‘s 1807
notebook:
And in Life‘s noisiest hour
There whispers still the ceaseless Love of Thee,
The Heart‘s Self-commune & soliloquy. (CW 16.1.2: 823)

The problem of Love, as described in these poems, is synonymous with the problem
of composition. The speaker sees or hears a vision or song which he then loses in the
hubbub of his life, and what he recalls is not the original, but the trace of it, the
dream‘s dream, the Heart acting out its soliloquy. By framing the question of love as
one of form, not content, Coleridge resolves an emotional dilemma with an artistic
solution: since all love is effectively the ghost of a greater feeling, the object of love
is somewhat irrelevant, as ―The Happy Husband‖ makes abundantly clear. If the
speaker has misgivings over love for someone who is not literally ―Wife,‖ these are
offset by a characterization of all love as part of a greater emotional whole.
Biographical context is, of course, one explanation here. Though the date of
composition for ―The Happy Husband‖ remains a mystery, it was certainly after
Coleridge‘s return from Malta to an unhappy marriage to Sarah Fricker. There are
also thematic overlaps between it and ―A Letter to ------ ,‖ an unpublished expression
32

of Coleridge‘s unrequited love for Sara Huchinson, and a poem which furnishes
further association of his feelings toward her with ―Joy‖ and ―strong music in the
soul‖ (CW 16.1.2: 677-691, line 309). But the topos of currents of music underlying
other notes was already familiar one in Coleridge‘s poetry, and occurs most similarly
in the earlier poem ―The Nightingale,‖ where the bird‘s song ―crowds, and hurries,
and precipitates / With fast thick warble his delicious notes‖ above ―one low piping
Sound more sweet than all‖ (CW 16.1.2: 516-520, lines 44-45, 61). As in the ―Happy
Husband,‖ the individual expression of love is predicated upon hearing a deeper
sound beneath it. However, in ―The Happy Husband,‖ Coleridge presents a formal
incarnation of this notion. Because the poem is neither unfinished nor part of a larger
piece, its fragment form should be read in relation to the metaphor of eddies and
stream, notes and song. The fragment poem becomes an expression of an artistic
philosophy in which a work of art itself is not a song, but a cluster of notes with a
larger song beneath it: a fragment poem, in other words, ―seems, yet cannot greater
be.‖ There is no more of the poem, yet there appears to be. To return to the original
problem of the speaker in ―The Happy Husband‖ between the ―turbulent‖ and
―transient‖ and the deeper feelings of (matrimonial?) love, we might read the
intended fragment poem as a form which, by definition, contains both the transient
and unfathomable. It is linguistic expression, but also the indication of language‘s
inadequacy. In calling ―The Happy Husband‖ a fragment, Coleridge elicits an
expectation of incompleteness; since the poem bears no outward sign of
33

incompleteness, the fragment, hitherto understood as a formal fact of the poem,
becomes a signal to readers of its content.
Thus we arrive at a new definition of the fragment poem: instead of being an
unfinished or out-of-context piece of verse, it is a formal invitation, permitting the
reader to interpret. Not, as Levinson claims, in an effort that completes it, but one that
connects the form with the content. As Coleridge put it in his fourth ―Essay on the
Principles of Method,‖ the great mind is recognizable even at its most incomplete:
―However irregular and desultory his talk, there is method in his fragments‖ (CW 4.1:
449). But the poet does not disclose this method—or if he does, as in ―Kubla Khan,‖
this disclosure fails, as it were, to provide closure. The fragment is, by definition, up
for grabs in terms of method and meaning. And this leaves it always open to
interpretation despite centuries of conjecture and explanation—formal, historical,
biographical, or otherwise. As the poet Joseph Brodsky remarked, ―Nothing lasts
longer than ruins‖ (qtd in McHugh, 68).

ii. What to make of the “mass of little things”?
Contrasting his habit of thinking to that of his peers in a letter to Poole,
Coleridge wrote, ―They contemplate nothing but parts, and parts are necessarily little.
And the universe to them is but a mass of little things” (CL 1: 354). And yet even the
poet who always insisted he was interested in the whole managed to leave behind, out
of necessity, a lot of little things. What do we make of the sometimes quite literal
fragments of Coleridge‘s work, the towering mountain of readable remains which
34

seems to rise ever higher, piled atop the poems: the journal entries, scraps of verse,
annotations on other books, epigrams, epitaphs, doggerel, semi-translations, ideas for
epics, dinner conversation, autographs, nursery rhymes, anagrams, recipes?
A common use of this material is to help explain recurrent allusions, themes
or images in the poetry, or to paint fuller pictures of how a poem was composed.
Carried to its logical extreme, this method would result in a complete cross
referencing of every word Coleridge wrote. Kenneth Burke, in The Philosophy of
Literary Form, claimed to be at work on such a project. Burke claims he would
―consider it vandalism to exclude certain material that Coleridge has left…the main
ideal of criticism, as I conceive it, is to use all that there is to use‖ (23). Promising to
use all of it, Burke drew up plans for elaborate and complete ―symbolic analysis‖ of
Coleridge‘s writing which would map lines of connection between the each
significant cluster of meaning in the material. Even as he confidently outlines this
project, however, we can sense its futility and absurdity; in the end, Burke himself
concedes as much—even if carried out successfully, he writes, the result would be a
―blot‖ of connections, as impenetrable as before.
Burke never completed the massive study that was to be ―The Particular
Imagination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.‖ The closest approximation of this goal,
though carried out in a much different fashion than Burke, is John Livingston
Lowes‘s 1927 The Road to Xanadu, a massive study of the composition of ―Kubla
Khan‖ and ―The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner‖ whose thesis was ―to discover how
the chaos of the imagination frames a thing of beauty‖ (xi). Lowes characterized the
35

Notebooks as ―the vast, diffused, and amorphous nebula out of which, like asteroids,
the poems leaped‖ and throughout his study, maintains bright-line distinctions
between such categories as ―poem‖ and ―fragment,‖ ―poetic unity‖ and ―materials,‖
―form‖ and ―chaos‖ (12). His closing characterization of the Notebooks reiterated
these differences, describing them as ―elements and shattered fragments…the figures
already lie, and what the carver-creator sees, implicit in the fragments, is the unique
and lovely Form‖ (434).
Tellingly, this description echoes the epigraph from ―The Picture‖ that
precedes ―Kubla Khan,‖ when the youth waits for the ―lovely form‖ of the naiad to
reappear in the stream, waiting as ―the fragments dim of lovely forms / Come
trembling back, unite‖ (99-100). This is a negative image, remember—the youth must
pull his head away from the pool if he is to live productively. But, as Lowes‘ echo
reminds us, it fits a certain perception of poetic imagination, in which images and
half-ideas are stored in the well of the poet‘s subconscious until an act of poetic
genius summons them for use and fuses them into poetry. For Lowes, the terms
―poem‖ and ―fragment‖ are incompatible: a poem has a complete form, a fragment is
the degraded version, and ―fragment‖ becomes a convenient category in which
everything but the Great Poem can be discarded.
That the Great Poem is itself a fragment is a fact unobserved by Lowes;
prefiguring later critics, he calls it ―A structure of exquisitely balanced and
coordinated unity‖ (432). Perhaps Lowes‘ praise, like later critics‘ claims for the
poem‘s unity, is meant to set our minds at ease over the prospect that we may actually
36

be celebrating an unfinished or incomplete work, as though we might not celebrate
the principles of imbalance and discord which the poem embodies—especially when
read in full with its preface and ―The Pains of Sleep.‖ Even when Coleridge
enumerates his method, in other words, we prefer our own.
I began with the question of origins; I will end with an inquiry into the end of
the fragment poem. What happens to the fragment poem after Romanticism, or at
least after the famous Romantic fragments? Does it continue as a form, and how does
it change? Where, ultimately, does it go? There have been a number of studies on the
Romantic fragment poem, but they treat its popularity as a brief moment in the
history of poetry. Studies of the epic fragments of Byron, Shelley, and Keats also tend
to equate form with biography. Because the poets‘ lives end suddenly and fairly
simultaneously, the trope of the fragment offers an appealing way of consolidating
disparate Romantic poets in a kind of common form which combines what McFarland
calls a ―disparactive triad‖ of ruin, loss, and incompletion. Biographically, it also
seems to fit Coleridge, who composed in fragments and left thousands of them
unpublished. Because the term ―fragment poem,‖ or even Levinson‘s more scientific
―RFP‖—is so overdetermined, it often seems that it is caught in a self-referential
circle of description: the fragment poem is Romantic and Romanticism is the
fragment poem.
An unexamined question, it seems to me, concerns the large number of
fragment poems that fall outside this circle. After all, the fragment form was a very
popular one, and though some of the great fragmentists are also the great Romantics,
37

there are hundreds of fragment poems in the newspapers of the mid nineteenth
century. Their subject is, roughly speaking, confined to death, ruin, and the
melancholy feeling Keats called ―a shadow of a magnitude.‖ In fact, many of the
poems echo his ―On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,‖ which was itself first published in
periodicals (both the Champion and the Examiner on March 9, 1817). There is
something instructive, perhaps, in the way that the fragment poem moves quickly
from an innovative form to an imitative one, from surprise to predictability. More
importantly, it is interesting to observe what amounts to a proscription of content by
form—in a few short years, the fragment seems to be writing itself.
Francis Jeffrey observed as early as 1813 that ―The taste for fragments...has
become very general; and the greater part of polite readers would now no more think
of sitting down to a whole Epic, than to a whole ox‖ (Reiman 2.2:842). His comment
is apropos of Byron‘s The Giaour, but his complaint is a general critique of the
relationship between apparently lazy readers and poets who are glad to satisfy that
appetite. On one level, Jeffrey is making a critical gesture that is common even today
by identifying an artistic trend which seems to be lessening the faculties of its
audience (think of rock and roll, action movies, conceptual art). And his point is not
without merit: a lot of the fragment poems that followed are bad poetry, exacerbated
by the false gravitas of the form. Take the following example of the anonymous poem
that appeared in the Conservative newspaper, Trewman's Exeter Flying Post on
September 27, 1821, titled ―Fragment found in the Skeleton Case at the Royal
38

Academy, and supposed to have been written and deposited there by a Student.‖
4
Its
first line is probably enough to get an idea: ―Behold this ruin!—‗twas a skull...‖
Materially, there is an equation here between the verse and the skull—both are
deposited in the case which holds dead relics of the past. The form is meant, quite
literally, as a skeleton of poetry, a single bone of the epic Ox Jeffrey alluded to years
before.
This use of the fragment form is not, of course, surprising. After all, what
could be more appropriate for a fragment poem than the fragmentary nature of life
itself? This is the question asked again and again by the fragment poems of the
nineteenth century. Often the reason for their remaining unfinished is the trope of a
dying speaker, as in ―THE PICTURE OF A BEAUTIFUL DEATH,‖ ―The Suicide. A
FRAGMENT,‖ ―AT LAST, O DEATH: A FRAGMENT.‖ In others, the fragment
form is meant to be a synecdoche of life itself, with the speaker intent on twice
reminding us—in theme and in form—of the inevitability of death. Life is a fragment,
these argue, since we cannot express fully what happens after it. Some of these titles
should suffice to give a sense of their argument: ―Autumn: A Fragment,‖ ―December:
A Fragment,‖ ―The Future: A Fragment,‖ ―Evening: A Fragment,‖ ―The Things that
Are: A Fragment.‖ And so on, until one hardly has to read the poem in order to know
its subject and trajectory.

4
The authorship of this poem remains unknown, though the poem itself was notable enough to be
reprinted under the initials W.H.A in William Hone‘s 1822 Table Book, a collection of various items
from the previous year‘s newspapers.
39

Levinson, in drawing conclusions about the economic context of the fragment poem,
hypothesizes that the fragment was, in effect, one way of reacting to the increasingly
contentious relationship of the poet upon an increasingly lowbrow public. Keats and
Wordsworth especially express their distaste for popular opinion (though Keats
believed he was at least capable of writing something popular, that is to say,
profitable). The fragment poem, because it requires a more adept reader, Levinson
argues, effectively screens the wrong kind of readership. It also elides the problem of
poetry as product, since the fragment lays no claims to being a finished work.
However, both of these assertions are thrown into doubt by the huge number of
fragment poems that appear, often anonymously, in the newspapers of the day. These
poems are like a diminishing echo of Romantic touchstones, repeating the same
themes and imagery but without the freshness of the original. In fact, a poem called
―The Ruined Cottage: A Fragment‖ appears in Trewman's Exeter Flying Post six
years after Wordsworth‘s poem of the same title appeared as the first book of The
Excursion. Rather than making poems something other than ―products,‖ the fragment
form, in being eminently reproducible, actually enables an industry of knock-offs,
each benefiting from a supposed authenticity of their label. In fact, one could see the
heightened tableaux of dying speakers as a kind of compensation, a dramatic effect
meant to provide urgency to poetry that has been drained of it. This is not a rebuttal to
Levinson‘s argument, but rather an extension of it: as is often the case, the
marketplace did not take long to appropriate artistic practice, even a practice that
arose initially in opposition to it.
40

Chapter 2: Making Piece with the Romantics

i. If it’s not broken, prefix it
Brenda Hillman‘s ―Styrofoam Cup‖ is a poem about John Keats‘s language,
specifically ―Ode on a Grecian Urn.‖ In this poem, included in its entirety below,
Hillman creates meaning by using two negatives: white space and the prefix ―un‖:
thou still unravished thou
thou, thou bride
thou unstill,
thou unravished unbride
unthou unbride
First published in the journal Fence in 1998, later reprinted in her 2001 book
Cascadia, and widely anthologized in various collections, the poem captures both a
sense of whimsy and depth; a response from the twenty-first century to Keats‘s
meditation on an object of mysterious beauty.
Hillman‘s poem is not an allusion to Keats as much as a reframing of
particular words: with the exception of the prefix un-, all of the words except the title
are from the first line of ―Ode on a Grecian Urn.‖ All of the language is from the first
line of Keats‘s poem, but Hillman is less interested in allusion and more in negation.
Of course, the idea of negation is organic to Keats, nowhere more so than in this
poem. In the context of ―Ode on a Grecian Urn,‖ ―Thou still unravish‘d bride of
41

quietness‖ describes both the urn and the mysterious rituals portrayed upon it: ―What
men or gods are these? What maidens loth? / What mad pursuit? What struggle to
escape? / What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?‖ The poem savors the
unknowable scene precisely because of its mystery. As the last stanza puts it, ―Thou,
silent form, dost tease us out of thought / As doth eternity‖ (44-45). To contemplate
the urn is to reflect, in other words, on questions of permanence and transience. What
outlasts us? What kinds of questions will the future have about our own objects? And
what kinds of values—truth, beauty, hydrocarbons—are embedded in them?
Even the prefix that Hillman uses really belongs to Keats, both in grammar
and philosophically. As the poet of negative capability, it should be no surprise that
Keats‘s favorite prefix is ―un.‖ It appears in so many of his poems that the following
is intended merely as a sample of its range:
―Snow / that drifts unfeathered‖ (Endymion, 750)
―Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves‖ (Hyperion, 40)
―Sense / unhaunted quite of all‖ (―Ode on Indolence,‖ 30)
―sweet unrest‖ (―Bright Star,‖ 12)
―unintellectual, yet divine‖ (―Lines to Fanny,‖ 12)
―thou still unravish‘d bride‖ (―Ode on a Grecian Urn,‖ 1)
Un-, for Keats, is a way of catching the reader in a double-take of association; for
example, ―unravish‘d‖ calls up ravishment while meaning chastity. The logic of
Hillman‘s poem is then embedded in Keats‘s work; she merely extends the process of
negation to new words, ―bride‖ and ―thou.‖
42

The meaning of Hillman‘s additional negations—―unbride / unthou‖—is,
appropriately, ambiguous. We may read ―unbride‖ as a noun or an imperative, as
either the negated state of the ―unravished‖ object or as a command from the poet.
But any way we determine what ―unbride‖ means is dependent upon what we think
―bride‖ means, both in the context of Keats‘s poem and in the context of Hillman‘s
revision. For Keats, the figure of the ―unravish‘d bride‖ stands for both the urn and
the scenes represented upon it: the pursuit of maidens by men or gods, the lovers who
are tantalizingly close to kissing but cannot, the heifer being led to sacrifice, the town
emptied of people. In the last stanza, the poem echoes the ―bride‖ of the first line in
the homophonic ―brede / Of marble men and maidens overwrought‖ (41-42). The urn
is personified by both ―bride‖ and ―brede‖; the two are braided, along with the other
images of address, into a garland of associations that even the poet calls
―overwrought.‖ The last stanza is a kind of assurance in the face of these mysteries,
spoken by the urn itself: ―‗Beauty is truth, truth beauty,‘—that is all / Ye know on
earth and all ye need to know‖ (49-50). And thus the great and animating
contradiction: the urn, at first a ―bride of quietness‖ and ―foster-child of silence,‖
knows more than the poet, and expresses itself more eloquently.
In the context of Hillman‘s work, however, the notion of the ―unbride‖ is
considerably less clear, though perhaps also less complex. One notable bride in
Cascadia is Louisa Amelia Knapp Smith Clapp, also known as Dame Shirley, who
traveled with her doctor husband to the mining camps California‘s Sierra Nevada in
1851. In her descriptions of the roughness of life in the mining towns, a recurring
43

theme in Clapp‘s letters is the challenge that she posed to traditional ideas of gender,
and more literally, the challenge that a woman posed to communities made up solely
of men. Hillman‘s ―The Shirley Poem,‖ based on these letters, is at the center of
Cascadia; central to its story is the way that Shirley‘s writing becomes an affirmation
of female expression and self-sufficiency. Shirley rides hundreds of miles by mule,
observes a hanging, learns the proper way to make baskets from the indigenous tribe
at Rich Bar; she also reads volumes of Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Keats stored in
her candle case bookshelf. In one sense, then, to ―unbride‖ means to dissolve the
bonds of marriage to an older tradition of literature in which women are subject and
object but not author of their story. Similarly, Cascadia’s opening poem, ―Sediments
of Santa Monica,‖ quotes Arnold‘s ―Dover Beach,‖ ―Ah love, let us be true to one
another,‖ but responds with its own judgment: ―The century had become a little
drippy at the end‖ (Cascadia 3).
In readings and interviews, Hillman characterizes ―Styrofoam Cup‖ as a sort
of rejoinder to Keats and as an undoing of the gender politics of the original poem.
―Unbride‖ articulates the power of speech over virginal silence, independence over
marital submission. But the specific reasoning behind such a response would be
difficult to articulate, given the fact that we have so little to go on in Hillman‘s poem.
In fact, its brevity is part of its strategy: as with the allusion to Arnold, we‘re given
the first line of Keats as though it were all we need to know, a small piece of the
Romantic papyrus. The poem offers a demonstration of the kind of reading process
which might be called postmodern in incarnation, but Romantic in the sense of
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presenting a decayed, fragmented object of past glory whose whole has been ravaged
by time, rendering only a ―shadow of a magnitude,‖ to use Keats‘s description of the
Elgin Marbles. Ultimately, the poem is proof of nothing but its own ambiguity: there
is no way of determining the independent meaning of ―unbride,‖ since it always
already depends upon our (perhaps incomplete) understanding of an earlier text.
Indeed, Hillman seems to be arguing that Keats‘s poem is already inscribed in our
minds, and so we have access to the language of the whole even as we read the partial
version; it is a typographical representation of a mental alteration—a demonstration
of allusion and of the desire to escape it.
Is ―Styrofoam Cup‖ also part of the Romantic formal tradition of fragment
poems? Its form of certainly calls to mind the process of physical fragmentation. Like
a piece of papyrus with strategically eaten holes, the white spaces are as striking as
the text itself. One way picturing the poem is as the physically decayed manuscript of
Keats, a series of fragments which we may or may not be able to complete. Keats
becomes an Alkman or Sappho, a poet whose song survives only in pieces. This
characterization is not accurate insofar as the poem survives intact, but it does seem
to express something about how we perceive, or prefer to perceive, Keats and
Romanticism in general. It must be noted that the object of address in Hillman‘s
poem is not only a styrofoam cup, but ―Ode on a Grecian Urn‖ itself, which appears
as a cipher of an earlier, now alien culture. In Keats, a speaker-poet asks these
questions, but in Hillman‘s poem, the reader herself must confront language without
reasons or context. Hillman‘s poem turns the formal wholeness of the ode into a more
45

open, less intelligible form, a series of fragments of its former self. As a result,
instead of a formally whole description of the beautifully incomprehensible, we are
faced with the fragmented, incomprehensible object itself.
In both poems we see the process of reading and attempting to decode cultural
artifacts from a previous age, but with different results. Keats comes to understand
this object even without its context, and the final lesson of the urn is the substitution
of aesthetic pleasure for context: ―‗Beauty is truth, truth, beauty,‘‖ the urn tells us.
For Hillman, this conclusion is impossible. Styrofoam, after all, is an emblem of
ugliness and blight. It does, however, match the urn for longevity—these lines are as
true for the cup as the urn: ―When old age shall this generation waste, / Thou shalt
remain, in midst of other woe / Than ours‖ (46-48). ―Styrofoam Cup‖ implicitly looks
ahead to a time when our own culture will be judged by future poets; how we
managed to produce so much ugliness and so little truth will be their puzzle.

ii. Incomplete, perfectly
Anne Carson, in The Beauty of the Husband, pursues a similar strategy of
fragmentation toward the work of Keats. Carson excerpts unlikely bits from ―To the
Ladies Who Saw Me Crown‘d‖ and ―Ode on Indolence‖ as epigraphs for each section
of the book. Two of the epigraphs, for example, appear as discarded scraps:
it springs
from a man‘s little heart‘s short fever-fit

and

46

And they were strange to me, as may betide
With vases (109)

Perhaps we‘re meant, through the radical isolation of the words on the page, to
reconsider our idea of Keats‘s poems as ―finished,‖ and use the white space now
surrounding them to recognize their indeterminacy and lack of closure. Like the Keats
of ―Styrofoam Cup,‖ the reader experiences a typographic representation of age, a
forced reckoning with the fact that we have so little to say to the Romantics. Carson,
herself a translator of Sappho and Mimnermos, is presenting an ancient Keats,
comparable with the lyric fragments of the Greeks. Fittingly, this is perhaps how
Keats might have liked to be remembered—it was Sappho, after all, who is supposed
to have written one of the earliest versions of the Endymion myth, and who Keats
praised alongside Shakespeare and Chatterton. The Keats of The Beauty of the
Husband appears as a mysterious, ancient writer of texts whose beauty can be
appreciated only in allusive, half-formed phrases, and whose contexts have been lost.
When we look at Carson‘s epigraph fragments in the context of the original
Keats poems we see a curious analogousness between, on one hand, Keats to the
ancient, and on the other, the present to Keats. In particular, ―Ode on Indolence‖ is an
example of this relationship. In it, the speaker awakens in a kind of dream, sees three
figures, which he recognizes as Love, Ambition, and Poesy:
One morn before me were three figures seen,
With bowed necks, and joined hands, side-faced,
And one behind the other stepp‘d serene,
In placid sandals, and in white robes graced:
They passed, like figures on a marble Urn,
When shifted round to see the other side;

47

They came round again; as when the Urn once more
Is shifted round, the first seen Shades return;
And they were strange to me, as may betide
With Vases, to one deep in Phidian Lore. (4-10)

For the speaker in this poem, as in ―Ode on a Grecian Urn‖ and ―On seeing the Elgin
Marbles,‖ the confrontation with the past is a confrontation with strangeness and
mystery. The ―Indolence‖ of the title is as much a result of this feeling of
estrangement as any laziness on the speaker‘s part: how can one reach out to Love,
Ambition or Poesy if they won‘t recognize you?
Carson‘s excerpt of the poem—―And they were strange to me, as may betide /
With vases‖—renders the strange figures from Keats‘s poem strange to us. Suddenly
a host of questions appear: Who? What vases? What does ―betide‖ mean? Two poetic
assumptions underlie Carson‘s strategy: first, that empty space functions as well as or
more fruitfully than text. Second, that a lack of context is as productive as context.
Keats, seen from this distance—even if it is an artificial distance—no longer presides
over the meaning of his own poem. Either we read him as the author of strange,
broken language, or, more likely, as an author whose language, once whole, now only
appears in fragments. Like the speaker in the original poem, we have trouble
recognizing this new figure. The Keats we see in Carson‘s epigraphs has nothing but
pure language without argument, a series of lines whose promise lies in something
other than their intelligibility. The way that Carson animates and estranges these lines
is analogous, perhaps unintentionally, to the way the poet in ―Ode on Indolence‖ is
able to perceive the movement and the stillness of the figures on the vase. Here, the
48

figures seem to be moving—―one behind the other stepp‘d serene,‖ and throughout
the poem there are indications that the figures are independently capable of
movement: ―they passed,‖ ―They came round again.‖ Their movement is a kind of
illusion: the repeating phrase, ―shifted round,‖ indicates motion, but it‘s actually the
motion of the observer, whose hands are turning the vase, obscuring the figures and
then revealing them anew. Similarly, the lines of Keats are obscured by the excision,
which has the effect of bringing them around again, but strangely (as with Vases).
Carson‘s epigraphs also make us consider the odd marriage of scholarship and
poetry. For example, one epigraph is from Keats‘s annotations to Paradise Lost. The
epigraph contains both his notation and a second, scholarly voice in brackets:

a sort of Delphic Abstraction a beautiful thing made more
beautiful by being reflected and put in a Mist
[there is a faint mark after beautiful read by one editor as a dash, by another as
a slip of the pen, while a third does not print it]

Though we don‘t actually know what Keats meant by this mark, or even if he meant
to make it, Carson reminds us of the fact that all composition is initially filled with
such indeterminate marks. The processes of standardization and canonization tend to
make them disappear, but Carson‘s Keats is frozen in permanent ambiguity. While
New Criticism celebrated the cognitive ambiguities in Keats‘s odes, Carson is
interested in textual ambiguity, the sort found in the faint and faded manuscripts
whose frailty is also a kind of authenticity. The original context of this remark, which
refers to Milton‘s use of the word ―vale,‖ has dropped away. In fact, like so many of
49

these fragments, it seems to be referring to itself: a beautiful thing made more
beautiful though mystification and lack of context.
Carson, as a translator of Sappho, professes to be drawn to the kind of
authenticity that comes with this lack. In her Sappho translation, If Not, Winter, she
attempts to recreate the original experience of reading the papyrus, rather than the
mediated feeling of translation and explanation. There are short poems within a sea of
brackets and question marks. Carson attempts to reintroduce spontaneity and
authenticity to the language of the poems, taking the reader through the experience of
reading the original papyrus. This process is marked by frustration and ambiguity—
for both translator and reader—and by certain aporia of meaning into which the mind
is free to fall and fill in the holes. For example, one of Sappho‘s ―poems‖ consists of
a single word, translated by Carson as ―apple-bride.‖ According to Carson, ―The
poem is incomplete, perfectly.‖ The effect is to read Sappho as though the poet had
written works whose missing parts she expects us to supply, half-intelligible poems to
be appreciated as incomplete or failed, their failure and incompleteness often
reinforcing Sappho‘s recurrent themes of longing and not having. That is, her ancient
poetic fragments have become contemporary fragment poems.
In the same way, her Keats appears ambiguously; sometimes even doubtful, as
in this epigraph from Otho the Great: “thine own altered in pencil possibly by Keats
to some small.‖ Alteration and possibility: such are the qualities of the fragment,
especially the translated fragment, in which the translator must find a way to translate
mood and sensation above literal meaning. This revision makes no sense without its
50

context, but Carson appears to want us to think more about the physical remainders of
writing—the pencil, the faint mark, the slip of a pen—than the ever-changeable
qualities of signifiers.
In a gesture analogous to Keats‘s dedication to Chatterton, Carson dedicates
The Beauty of the Husband to Keats. The full dedication reads ―To Keats, for his
general surrender to Beauty, and on the grounds that a dedication has to be flawed if a
book is to remain free‖ (ii). It‘s an enigmatic statement, since it‘s unclear how the
dedication actually is flawed. But it has the effect of reminding us of the dedication—
or rather, the two dedications—that Keats wrote for Endymion. The first version,
which was scrapped by his publishers for reasons below, was written in March of
1818. He anticipates the scorn of Blackwood’s and the Quarterly, predicting ―a
London drizzle or a Scotch mist,‖ but asks in supplication, that ―it be the curtesy of
my peruser rather to pity my self-hindering labours than to malice me.‖ In closing, he
offers the following dedication: ―INSCRIBED, WITH EVERY FEELING OF PRIDE AND
REGRET AND WITH ‗A BOWED MIND,‘ TO THE MEMORY OF THE MOST ENGLISH OF POETS
EXCEPT SHAKESPEARE, THOMAS CHATTERTON.‖ And, as though sensing this gesture
leaves him open to further rebuke, he writes, ―One word more—for we cannot help
seeing our own affairs in every point of view—should any one call my dedication to
Chatterton affected I answer as followeth: ‗Were I dead, sir, I should like a Book
dedicated to me.‘‖ In The Beauty of the Husband, he gets his wish.
Yet what does the dedication to Keats actually mean in the context of
Carson‘s book? That the work somehow becomes ―free‖ through its flaws? Carson
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has written in the past about the value of error; following Aristotle, she claims
metaphor ―causes the mind catching itself in the act of making a mistake,‖ and in a
poem called ―Essay on What I Think About Most‖ in Men in the Off Hours, she gives
the example of the seventh century poet Alkman, whose description of the seasons
contains an error in arithmetic:
[?] made three seasons, summer
and winter and autumn third
and fourth spring when
there is blooming but to eat enough
is not. (Carson 32)

The cause of this mistake, Carson argues, is the physical hunger felt by the poet, a
poor farmer during a bad year. To the extent that the flaw dramatizes this hunger,
Carson suggests, it is a ―true mistake.‖ Or, as Stanley Plumly puts it in his biography
of Keats, ―he understood there are no mistakes in art, only failures‖ (332). In its
failure, the preface to Endymion tells us more about the poet‘s life, his anxieties and
hunger for a place among English poets, than it does about the poem, which it
characterizes as ―a feverish attempt, rather than a deed accomplished,‖ a ―failure in a
great object.‖ Alkman‘s poem develops its flaws over time, through moths or
moisture, but for Keats, Endymion represents a necessary failure that is part of poetic
development, as he describes in the preface:
The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is
healthy, but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment,
the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted:
thence proceeds mawkishness, and all the thousand bitters which those men
[critics] I speak of must necessarily taste in going over the following pages.

52

In Alkman and Sappho, Carson reads the holes as though intended, and to an extent,
seems to characterize Keats in the same way: the failure is both natural and if not
deliberate, unavoidable.
For Carson, Keats is also a figure of ―general surrender to beauty.‖ We might
think of this characterization as similar to the Pre-Raphaelite infatuation with Keats as
a luxuriant dreamer of the senses in ―Isabella,‖ ―Lamia,‖ or Endymion himself,
described ―as one by beauty slain‖ (98). Beauty, especially physical beauty, also
carries the ability to devastate those attracted to it. In The Beauty of the Husband, the
husband is serially unfaithful and untruthful; his beauty convinces him of an
entitlement to his own kind of truth. This is the other side of the Grecian urn‘s
equation: beauty dictates truth in the same way that power does. Carson‘s book
articulates this point from a position of abject weakness—the lover of beauty, the
wife. Even after all his infidelities, the speaker admits: ―I loved him for his beauty. /
As I would again / if he came near‖ (9). In the end, Keats‘s ―surrender‖ to beauty is
figured as a similar experience to that of the wife‘s long-suffering love of her
husband.
In October of 1818 Keats described his feelings toward marriage to his brother
George:
The mighty abstract Idea I have of Beauty in all things stifles the more divided
and minute domestic happiness—an amiable wife and sweet Children I
contemplate as part of that Beauty, but I must have a thousand of those
beautiful particles to fill up my heart...These things, combined with the
opinion I have generality (sic) of women—who appear to me as children to
whom I would rather give a sugar Plum than my time, form a barrier against
Matrimony which I rejoice in. (Letters I:403)

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Marriage and domestic happiness are ―particles,‖ ―divided and minute.‖ As in
Coleridge‘s fragment poem, ―The Happy Husband,‖ the small joys of daily living are
contrasted, perhaps antagonistically, to the experience of a ―mighty abstract Idea of
Beauty.‖ This kind of distinction between the partial experience of happiness and the
mightily abstract but whole pursuit of Beauty presents obvious complications,
apparent in the story of Carson‘s doomed husband and wife. In a way, the husband‘s
continual desire for Beauty in the abstract and the wife‘s surrender to his physical
beauty are embodiments of this Romantic distinction.
Side note: two months after he wrote this letter, Keats proposed to Fanny
Brawne, proving Beauty in the abstract is bound to lose out to its physical
embodiment. And this is part of Carson‘s point when she notes, perhaps thinking of
the famous formulation spoken by the Grecian Urn, ―Beauty makes sex sex.‖

iii. Imagined pinnacles and penises
In March of 1817, Keats made a series of visits, sometimes with Benjamin
Haydon, sometimes alone, to see the sections of friezes taken from the Parthenon by
Lord Elgin which had been sold to the British Museum. There had been a public
debate over this sale, and a week later, the topic still fresh in the public mind, both the
Champion and the Examiner published Keats‘s ―On Seeing the Elgin Marbles.‖ The
poem and the experience it recounts, Thomas McFarland argues, represent the two
essential requirements of lyric poetry: a sense of lost grandeur and the knowledge that
the poet‘s life, too, will soon fade. In Keats‘s poem, seeing the broken sculptures
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provokes a crippling sense of life‘s transience: ―Mortality / weighs heavily on me like
unwilling sleep, / And each imagined pinnacle and steep / Of godlike hardship tells
me I must die / Like a sick eagle looking at the sky‖ (1-4).
About 150 years later, the poet Alan Dugan made a similar trip, recorded in
his poem ―Fragment on the British Museum.‖ Dugan‘s work, like Keats, often uses
the poetry and mythology of the Greek and Roman empires, but his tone could not be
more different. He describes the toes of the figures as ―corrupt with the athlete‘s foot /
of many years of endurance,‖ and demands, ―Elgin! Where are the penises / and
noses?‖ (8-9, 11-12). Dugan does soften into something like appreciation at the end,
where the speaker sees into the broken-open heads of the figures, exposing their
―stone thought,‖ which is:
that the marble is
processional like its friezes
of gods, people, and beasts
and their grasses fed by water
down from the rock tables
in the mountains came from in
their process from the quarry
to the dust motes in a sunbeam
entering a dead museum
and goes off someplace else
I can not know about while going. (23-34)

If Keats imagines the lost grandeur of the whole work, Dugan imagines the whole
civilization from which the work was removed. Dugan‘s poem asks us to consider
this latest incarnation of stone as part of a cycle that encompasses ―gods, people, and
beasts‖ as well as the natural world of ―rock tables / in the mountains.‖ Instead of
remnants, Dugan characterizes the stone of the sculptures as being in transit, on its
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way back—as we all are—to dust. Like Keats, Dugan inclines toward thoughts of
mortality, but in a way that makes dying part of a ―processional,‖ dynamic process.
The only ―dead‖ object is the museum itself.
Dugan is also interested in illustrating the particular historicity of the friezes
that Keats chooses to ignore, or perhaps didn‘t know. It‘s a particularly violent
history:
A Captain Hammond
took two heads to Denmark;
other heads cut in half
show how the stone‘s brains
are full of incidents. Who cares
whether the faces are chopped off
or not? (12-18)

Readers of Dugan are accustomed to this kind of observation, as his poetry is often
full of violence—particularly the obscene violence of war—showing it to be comic,
pointless, vain, and wrenching by turns. His sense of violence is historical, too:
details from Spartan warfare, the American Civil War, the assassination of the
Emperor M.C. Tacitus, and an accident at Coney Island appear in a kind of
continuum, not unlike the way the stone of the marbles evolves into and out of its
figurations in this particular poem. The violence done to the marbles in ―Fragment on
the British Museum‖ reminds us of the brutality of conflict and of the corporality of
the statues, which appear before the speaker like the mutilated corpses of war dead.
Unlike Keats‘s poem, Dugan‘s vision of the marbles is unimpressed by their weight,
both in the literal and historical sense. Instead, their scale is made human, with human
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wounds. Where Keats is overwhelmed by the godly grandeur of the implicit scale of
the whole, Dugan‘s vision is on the distinctly bodily elements of the statues—
athlete‘s foot, penises, noses, faces, heads, brains. We needn‘t look to the imagination
to tell us about our mortality: it‘s already in our heads (especially if they‘ve been
cracked open).
In The Body in Pieces: the Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity, Linda
Nochlin suggests that Dugan‘s perception of bodily violence in the fragment dates
back to the French Revolution, when fragmentation, mutilation and destruction were
―founding tropes of the visual rhetoric‖ of revolutionary art (9). Moreover, because
they represented the deliberate destruction of the past, these fragments functioned
allegorically as a reinforcement of revolutionary principles: you can only pull apart a
statue if you‘ve overthrown the leader it represents. Likewise, Dugan notices the
violence necessary to remove the Elgin Marbles, and its implicit lack of regard for
human form—―who cares / whether the faces are chopped off / or not?‖ The question
is about stone faces, but Dugan‘s point—proved again and again by history—is that
once we begin chopping off marble heads, human ones can‘t be far behind.
What is formally interesting about Dugan‘s poem is that it uses a self-
consciously Romantic form—a ―Fragment‖—in conjunction with a Romantic
touchstone, and arrives at something like the Romantic formulation of the
unknowable whole: ―something I can not know about while going.‖ The fact that his
poem is presented to the reader as a fragment despite its appearance of completion is
a gesture toward Romanticism, but also a tongue stuck at its notions of nostalgia for
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Greek splendor. In presenting itself as part of a great whole, the Romantic fragment
was a form which itself embodied Keats‘s ―shadow of a magnitude.‖ Like the Elgin
Marbles or Sappho‘s verse, it was incomplete, perfectly. In the incompleteness of the
form, the reader was faced with an argument that reversed the ideal of artistic
achievement from product to process; like Shelley‘s ―Ozymandias,‖ the fragment
proves the folly of asserting completion. But in Dugan‘s poem, the statues are not
decayed products of a finer past. They are not even remarkable but for the way they
fit into a set of historical traumas—their fractured state does not prove the grandeur of
a Golden age, but the stupidity of those which followed.

iv. Disassembling the dissembling
One further example of a contemporary self-titled fragment is from Lucie
Brock-Broido‘s ―Fragment on Dissembling,‖ short enough to give it here entirely:
Curious in your dark
Frock-coat, do everything
That you have to,
If it is time;
Leave nothing
Still unsaid.
Once, to make of nothing
Something, was divine.
To have made of something
Nothing, was sublime.

The connection to the Romantic fragment here is less in the text than the setting.
Unlike the poetry of Carson and Hillman, the language is not directly borrowed, nor,
like Dugan, is the poet addressing a familiarly Romantic subject. Perhaps it is a
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matter of atmosphere, for lack of a better term, set by ―Once‖ and the ―Frock-coat‖
worn by the dissembler, marking the poem as a scene of the long eighteenth century.
Its appellation of ―fragment,‖ like the frock coat, is intended as a marker of
peculiarity, anachronism. As with Dugan‘s poem, the form is meant to be taken as a
gesture—and like Dugan, Brock-Broido ends up in Romantic territory: divinity and
sublimity.
But which is which? Something from nothing is divine: the tale of Genesis.
But the art of saying ―nothing / Still unsaid,‖ of making nothing from something:
sublime. By accident, we catch an echo of Keats/Hillman here and the ―still
unravished...unbride.‖ But it is an interesting accident, since both poems are marked
by conspicuous absences. In the same way, the fragment participates in a sublimity
which is dependent on, quite literally, giving nothing to the reader—a suggestive
nothing, but nothing all the same. We might also note how the enjambment of the
fourth and fifth lines creates an epigrammatic moment within the poem: ―If it is time;
/ Leave nothing‖ (4-5). The dissembler uses everything, leaves nothing; the skilled
liar always incorporates bits of truth. But the lie is also the creation of nothing, a void
without truth. ―Nothing will come of nothing,‖ Lear warns his daughter Cordelia after
she refuses to flatter him with praise, but Cordelia‘s response is the only honest one, a
―Nothing‖ which exposes the lies of her sisters, dissemblers who make something of
nothing. The poem rests on the awareness of artifice, both in language and form.
Brock-Broido‘s allegiance to Wallace Stevens can also be heard here as well,
in the multiple nothings of ―The Snow Man,‖ whose listener in the snow, ―nothing
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himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is‖ (Stevens 9). To
notice the nothing is the task Stevens asks of us, not simply nothing. And to hear ―any
human suffering / in the sound of the wind‖ is worse than seeing nothing, since it
perceives a relation that is not there, a relation between nature and man celebrated by
Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth.
Brock-Broido‘s poem is a suggestion of the similarities between poetry and
―dissembling‖—not the first time this accusation has been made. In the context of its
purported form as fragment, however, Brock-Broido is marshalling a self-
consciousness of form and artifice which has its roots back in the Romantic fragment
poem. Levinson summarizes our perception of the Romantic fragment poems in the
following way: ―a form that was originally offered as a most natural, spontaneous,
sincere and literary creation now looks like a most artificial, ironic, and literary
construction‖ (199). Brock-Broido‘s ―fragment‖ originates in artifice, and questions
its own sincerity even before we can. Yet it also addresses the original intention of the
form as the Romantics saw it, calling our attention to the uncompleted or lost part of
the poem, or ―the nothing that is.‖
Like so many fragment poems, its ultimate subject is itself.

v. Nothing lasts longer than ruins
Even if we concur with Levinson‘s assessment, there remains irresolution in
any poem called a ―fragment‖ between our perceptions of its
completion/independence and the artist‘s insistence on its partiality/dependence. The
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same could be said, of course, of any poetic form: form is there to indicate a set of
expectations which may or may not be fully realized, or which may be left unrealized
for productive effect. But there are special circumstances for the contemporary
fragment poem, since it is produced in an age when, as Carson put it in an interview,
―The forms are in chaos.‖ That is not to say that poetic closure, or the feeling of an
ending, has fallen out of favor, only that poets seem to rely less and less upon the
demands of form in order to facilitate it. Within this spirit of radical poetic
individualism, each poem is a form unto itself, generating and living by its own rules.
If the fragment poem feels artificial and ironic in this milieu, it is perhaps because
there are no longer wholes to compare it to, no normative examples of the form for
the reader to judge poems against. Each poem is whole in its own way; or, as Heather
McHugh claims, ―all poetry is fragment,‖ a statement meant to symbolize both the
elusiveness of poetic language the more general inadequacy of all language (Broken
English 75).
And then again, perhaps the ―fragment poem,‖ for all the formal legitimacy
given to it by Romantic scholars, has really never risen above the level of a
metaphorical request, asking readers to cast aside preconceived notions of what poetic
form. According to its preface, ―Kubla Khan‖ is both a ―dream,‖ a ―fragment,‖ and,
as Coleridge insists, more a ―psychological curiosity‖ than a poem. Rather than the
invention of a new form, Coleridge‘s mixture indicates a mixture of genres and
disciplines whose interdependence seems the larger point; its fragmentariness, he
insists, is only one quality among many. Schlegel, in attempting to fuse poetry with
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philosophy, speculated that the ideal form of Romanticism would combine the two
into a ―symgenre.‖ The conflation of poetic form and poetic philosophy makes it
difficult to say where a ―real‖ fragment ends and the idea of the fragment begins to
take its place.
Scholarly studies of the Romantic fragment poem invariably resemble
taxonomy, though the classifications are according to criteria that in the end are at the
discretion of the scholar. Frequently, these distinctions have little to do with the
content of the poem, and more to do with perceptions of its authenticity as a
fragment, or the believability of its author‘s explanation for leaving it unfinished. For
example, since Shelley died before completing ―The Triumph of Life‖ it is called
―real,‖ ―accidental,‖ ―involuntary,‖ or some other term indicating its legitimacy,
while ―Kubla Khan‖ and Keats‘s ―Hyperion,‖ published in a state of (merely
purported) incompleteness, are ―deliberate,‖ or ―intended.‖ Often, a kind of
authenticity is conferred upon those poems whose incompletion was accidental, or,
better yet, cut short by death, as though the poet died for the poem, his last breath
spent in attempting to finish. The form has the potential to be not only influenced by
the poet‘s biography, but a formal embodiment of it, an incomplete work by an
incomplete life. But such an idea of authenticity is always already the product of
artifice. In the case of Shelley‘s last epic fragment, ―The Triumph of Life,‖ the
question that ends the poem—―Then, what is Life?‖—originally had the beginnings
of an answer; Mary Shelley wisely edited it out before its publication (Janowitz, 202).
In the end, deliberateness and accident are compatible.
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Perhaps more importantly, the afterlife of the fragment poem in contemporary
poetry has been as an indication of artfulness, not naturalness. In the examples above,
each poet is responding predominately to the sense of intention and awareness in the
fragment, not its involuntary or accidental qualities. And for the reader, there is
something suspicious about a poem professing to be a fragment. Perhaps because our
expectations of wholeness no longer depend upon formal achievement, we are
distrustful of poetry that seems to be part of the bygone Romantic dream of organic
unity. After Modernism, we have accepted as fact the fate of poetry to fall to pieces:
―I cannot make it cohere,‖ ―These fragments I have shored against my ruins,‖ write
Pound and Eliot at the end of The Cantos and ―The Waste Land.‖ Fragmentation, in
the postmodern sense, is the representation of living in a world a unified vision of
reality or the self is replaced by an endless cycle of competing versions. The
Romantic fragment poem, insofar as it signals the possibility of wholeness—either in
poetic form or in the world at large—can seem rather quaint, even nostalgic, amid the
postmodern sensibility. But this is part of its endurance as a form. Since it relies only
upon the particular reader‘s notions of what constitutes a whole and a part, and
because such definitions continue to be revised, the fragment poem is likely to
continue meaning different things for future ages. Not unlike an urn dug up in a
midden, a cup washed up on the beach.
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Chapter 3: Penknifemanship: Fragments of Alteration and Excision

i. Reading the invisible
The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge contain a note written by
Coleridge in a copy of his 1813 play Remorse. Or more accurately, there is a space
where there used to be a note. As the editors tell us,
The writing has been almost completely erased, and only individual words
and phrases can be deciphered (in several cases only conjecturally) with the
aid of ultraviolet light. Thus:

Mr Editor,
Wh……….to inform you
of...p….es?………….
………………………
you will……..ly account
it pas…the………….
in……………………
……..he…….suited
age……..I at last
………….he
……to Imitate the Management
by………….Men in……so
him…again. E….h Well
by him……
the rish feast……!!!
I leave…to….t
is……..lth— (16.1: 1319)

How, and why, is this part of Coleridge‘s work? What are we meant to make of it?
Historical study tells us that this particular copy of the play belonged to a man named
W.H. West, who worked as a messenger and sometimes copyist for London
playwrights. The title page of this copy, inserted into the manuscript by West, reads
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The. | REMORSE | Mark’s and Altered | from | the | Manuscript at by |
W. West | A. Domini 1813 | S.T. Coleridge. author
West, it seems, had altered sections of Remorse—either deliberately or mistakenly—
without permission from the author, and Coleridge was not pleased with the result.
Whatever he wrote, it was apparently inappropriate or insulting enough for West to
erase it before he delivered it to the stage manager of the theatre at Hull. What did
Coleridge write? The note is an unintelligible palimpsest whose tone of annoyance is
still legible, but barely. Someone is attempting to ―Imitate the Management,‖ and
there is a likely reference to an ―[I]rish feast,‖ slang for a hodge-podge of
unappetizing scraps. And apparently, he left behind his first two initials as a clue: ―Mr
Editor, / Wh .‖ As for the rest, we are literally missing the rest of the ―Wh—‖: who,
what, where, why? A glance at the title page shows the problem of authorship already
brewing. What—or where—is West? He is the marker and alterer, but not the author;
on the page he literally comes between Coleridge and the play.
What is wonderful is the way that the notion of alteration itself keeps haunting
these events: Coleridge was angry about unauthorized excisions to the play, and yet
what became of his complaint? West erased that, too. Now we only read it in a
context highly mediated by scholarship (and science, as in ultraviolet light): a literally
invisible document, of interest only to the specialist, a document we must alter by our
own conjecture in order to make meaningful. And if it is meaningful, then who wrote
it, and where does the meaning come from? The language, the intent, the historical
context? And does West‘s alteration create a new work or a fragment of the old? In
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beginning with this anecdote, I want to call attention to the problem of indeterminacy
of authorship, not as a scholarly problem to be solved, but as an artistic ideal opposed
the idea of wholeness. Coleridge said of the lesser imaginations, ―They contemplate
nothing but parts, and parts are necessarily little. And the universe to them is but a
mass of little things‖ (CL 354). The great artist, that is, perceives the whole, and this
perception informs his art. In the following examples, an original text functions as
canvas and language for another poet, making new work but keeping the old. These
texts value excision, rather than creation. But like the mutilated flyleaf of a two
hundred year-old play, they also assume that value comes from a shared sense of
scholarship between writer and reader; each project involves us in not just an act of
reading, but an act of attempted understanding of a literary past. The altered text and
the altered book emphasize the partiality, not the totality, of this understanding—in
other words, the contemplation of the part, not the universe.

ii. “All were open’d”: Paradise rearranged
The first is Ronald Johnson‘s epic RADI OS, first published in 1977, made
from excising parts of Paradise Lost (the other potential title was PARADES).
Reportedly, Johnson was inspired by the Lukas Foss 1967 composition ―Baroque
Variations,‖ which arranges excerpts of Handel, Scarlatti and Bach to create a sound
both neoclassical and modern. Johnson‘s work accomplishes a similar combination
with Milton‘s language—Guy Davenport describes it as ―Milton imagiste‖—by
opening the poem‘s opening to create a world of lyric chaos:
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O
tree
into the World
Man
the chosen
Rose out of Chaos:
song. (Johnson 3)

What is missing from this beginning? The creator, for one: man arises like a
rose, not according to the plans of his Maker. And like the rose, particularly
Emerson‘s rose, he exists in a world unto himself. A rose out of chaos is in part the
ars poetica of Radi Os, which is deliberately concrete, yet enormously ambiguous.
Johnson‘s preference is for the elemental nouns of the story, and in this opening the
only potential verb (―Rose‖) also functions as a noun. In this, Davenport‘s
comparison to Ezra Pound and H.D. is apt, as far as it goes: Imagism stripped poetry
to what it imagined were the barest necessities, creating sequences whose logic was
pictorial, not linguistic. In this scheme, space mattered as much as language; Pound
initially asked that ―In a Station of the Metro‖ be printed:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd
petals on a wet, black bough
5

5
One could even make a case that sections of ―The Waste Land‖ qualify as altered texts, with Pound radically excising Eliot‘s
language to create lines of stark clarity, ―shaking out ashes from amid the glowing coals, leaving the luminous bits to discover
their own unexpected affinities.‖ This description is Hugh Kenner describing Pound‘s revisions, but it echoes Davenport‘s
description of Johnson‘s compositional process: ―the mining of a particular ore...isolating, for greater clarity, a single radiant
quality‖ (102). In other words, Johnson‘s project is not a subversion of Milton, but an attempt to isolate particular ―luminous
details,‖ to use Pound‘s phrase.

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But perhaps more than Pound, one feels the influence of the Objectivist poets in
Johnson‘s project. The famous freestanding couplet from Reznikoff‘s Jerusalem the
Golden—―Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies / a girder, still itself among the
rubbish‖—seems to describe Johnson‘s poetic architecture more than Pound‘s
experiment with fragments in ―Papyrus.‖ Appropriately, Johnson‘s version of Eden is
all Oppened up, leaving only an elemental vocabulary:

Beneath him with new wonder now he views [ 205 ]
To all delight of human sense exposed
In narrow room Natures whole wealth, yea more,
A Heaven on Earth, for blissful Paradise
Of God the garden was, by him in the East
Of Eden planted; Eden stretched her Line [ 210 ]
From Auran Eastward to the Royal Towrs
And all amid them stood the Tree of Life,
High eminent, blooming Ambrosial Fruit
Of vegetable Gold; and next to Life [ 220 ]
Our Death, the Tree of Knowledge grew fast by,
Knowledge of Good bought dear by knowing ill.
Pass'd underneath ingulft, for God had thrown [ 225 ]
That Mountain as his Garden mould high raised
Upon the rapid current, which through veins
Of porous Earth with kindly thirst up drawn,
Rose a fresh fountain, and with many a rill
Waterd the Garden; thence united fell [ 230 ]
Down the steep glade, and met the neather Flood,
Which from his darksom passage now appeers,
And now divided into four main streams,
Runs divers, wandring many a famous Realme
How from that Saphire Fount the crisped Brooks,
Rolling on Orient Pearl and sands of Gold,
With mazie error under pendant shades
Powrd forth profuse on Hill and Dale and Plaine,
Both where the morning sun first warmly smote
The open field, and where the unpierc't shade [ 245 ]
Imbround the noontide Bowrs: Thus was this place,
A happy rural seat of various view;
Groves whose rich Trees wept odorous Gumms and Balme,
Others whose fruit burnisht with Golden Rind (74)

Johnson‘s task is not to render Milton as an ancient and mysterious text, but to turn
our attention to the materials of the world, as well as the materiality of language
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itself. The scene of Eden retains its natural elements, but it‘s a place much more
rough-hewn than Milton‘s version. Under Milton‘s lush embellishments, Radi Os
finds the girders: ―earth,‖ ―sun,‖ ―field.‖ The leaps of cognition necessary for reading
such a text are not all that different than for other Objectivist poems, where the
primary directive is towards clarity and tangibility. Both are found here as well. Radi
Os is not, in other words, so much a subversion of Paradise Lost as an extraction its
elemental human themes.
In Book II, as Satan and his generals debate the wisdom of declaring war on
God, Belial reminds the assembly of the consequences of losing this battle. His forty
lines are redacted to a single suggestive question and answer in Johnson‘s redaction:

What if the breath What if the breath that kindl'd those grim fires [
Awak'd should Awak'd should blow them into sevenfold rage
plunge us in the flames; or from above And plunge us in the flames? or from above
Should intermitted vengeance arm again
if all His red right hand to plague us? what if all

Her stores were open'd, and this Firmament [ 175 ] Her stores were open'd, and this Firmament [
Of Hell should spout her Cataracts of Fire, Of Hell should spout her Cataracts of Fire,
Impendent horrors, threatning hideous fall
One day upon our heads; while we perhaps One day upon our heads; while we perhaps
Designing or exhorting glorious warr, Designing or exhorting glorious warr,
Caught in a fierie Tempest shall be hurl'd
Each on his rock transfixed, the sport and prey Each on his rock transfixt, the sport and prey
Of racking whirlwinds, or for ever sunk
Under yon boyling Ocean, wrapt in Chains;
There to converse with everlasting groans,
Unrespited, unpitied, unrepreevd, [ 185 ]
Ages of hopeless end; this would be worse.
Warr therefore, open or conceal'd, alike
My voice disswades; for what can force or guile
With him, or who deceive his mind, whose eye
all things at one view? Views all things at one view? He from heav'ns highth
All these our motions vain, sees and derides;
Not more Almighty to resist our might
Then wise to frustrate all our plots and wiles.
then, live thus Shall we then, live thus vile, the race of Heav'n
I laugh, when those who Thus trampl'd, thus expell'd to suffer here [ 195 ]
Chains and these Torments? better these then worse

69

By my advice; since fate inevitable
Subdues us, and Omnipotent Decree
The Victors will. To suffer, as to doe,
Our strength is equal, nor the Law unjust [ 200 ]
That so ordains: this was at first resolv'd,
If we were wise, against so great a foe
Contending, and so doubtful what might fall.
at the Spear ar I laugh, when those who at the Spear are bold
And vent'rous, if that fail them, shrink and fear [ 205 ]
What yet they know must follow, to endure
Exile, or ignominy, or bonds, or pain,
The sentence of their Conquerour: This is now
Our doom; which if we can sustain and bear,
in time (27) Our Supream Foe in time may much remit[
175 ]
[ 180 ]

In Milton, we survive the waves of language by being anchored in plot, dialogue, and
characterization; we never forget that the dread in this passage is part of a monologue,
and the monologue part of a discussion between the fallen angels. But without these,
Belial‘s fears become an existential cry in a universe of random catastrophes. The
fear that ―all were open‘d‖ ―One day upon our heads‖ is the fear of a consciousness
looking for order and finding none. In Johnson‘s text, the very thing that keeps us
alive—―breath‖—may ―plunge us into flames.‖ The stark randomness of the language
in Radi Os is its own version of a world whose Creator also destroys. This knowledge
of death and chaos is, after all, Eve and Adam‘s knowledge, and their curse. And
weighed against all the mythical tortures imagined by Belial, it‘s unclear which is
worse.
In Radi Os, the many voices of Milton‘s story become a series of
investigations by a single speaker, a figure who is neither Master nor Man but
something in between. As Eric Selinger writes,

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The claims the poem makes for its hero‘s agency...are not made on behalf of
the poet as individual mind or major man, text-wrestler, aesthetic/prophetic
hero (or, in his exemplary failure, antihero). Those claims must be, instead,
interpolated by the reader in an exegetical act not unlike the one Johnson, in
his etching, has already performed. (69)

Selinger is right that any claims the book offers are mediated by particular acts of
readers‘ interpretations. However, one could reasonably say this about any book.
What is distinctive about Johnson‘s text is the way its claim is embedded in, and
inseparable from, its method of creation as well as its product. In the end, the reader is
asked not only to perform an exegesis on the text, but on something larger—the last
lines suggest the book has endowed the reader with the ability to ―read‖ outside the
text:
Satan, I know thy strength, and thou know'st mine,
Neither our own but giv'n; what follie then
To boast what Arms can doe, since thine no more
Then Heav'n permits, nor mine, though doubld now
for proof look up, To trample thee as mire: for proof look up,
And read thy Lot in yon And read thy Lot in yon celestial Sign
Where thou art (91) Where thou art weigh'd, and shown how light, how weak,
If thou resist. The Fiend lookt up and knew
His mounted scale aloft: nor more; but fled
Murmuring, and with him fled the shades of night

―Look up,‖ that is, from the book, into the world. But what kind of world are we
meant to return to after Radi Os? And how has the book taught us to read it? The
following texts are explorations of this question.

iii. No way to treat a book
Tom‘s Phillips‘s A Humument is introduced by its author as ―A Treated
Victorian Novel.‖ Treatment in this case means many things: effacement, alteration,
appropriation. Using the 1892 novel A Human Document by W.H. Mallock as his
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source, Phillips paints and collages his way through a field of pictorial and linguistic
possibilities. These possibilities are literally endless, as each page contains within it
an infinite number of alternate versions: in the postscript to the fourth edition of the
book, Phillips writes that ―the goal of the work is to replace itself by revisions.‖
Authorial agency in A Humument is always somewhat murky, partly by
design. At times, it seems as though Phillips claims to occupy the position of
interpreter instead of maker, merely Tireseas to its signs. He describes its almost
mystical authority as akin to the I Ching; a book of images and divination that
influenced John Cage‘s poetic compositions, among others. It‘s the book speaking,
not the author: Phillips says he goes to the book never knowing what it will say, but
unlike the poet facing a blank page, his compositional process begins with a field of
text, from which the poem must be made. Yet at other times, he takes pride in his own
abilities as interpreter, writing in the afterward, ―I yet to find a situation, statement or
thought which its words cannot be adapted to cover,‖ from South African apartheid to
his own fiftieth birthday (―Notes on A Humument”).
Phillips is still interested in narrative, and the movement of A Humument is
novelistic, a plot founded on the maxim of E.M. Forster—―only connect‖—crossed
with William Burroughs cut-up and fold-in techniques, which in turn were inspired
by the collages of Modernist painting. Like Burroughs, whose intent was to create
what he called ―a series of deja vues,‖ the plot of A Humument works through
exegetical accretion rather than conventional narration. The book‘s hero, Toge, exists
only where Mallock‘s original vocabulary permits—in ―together‖ or ―altogether,‖—
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and his figure is visible only as a tracing of the white space between words and lines
of the original book. Toge always appears with one of a series of totems: a window, a
phallus, a rug, a pen, a picture (see Figure 1).
The plot of A Humument, at least as first conceived (or perceived), is a quest
for love. Toge‘s love interest, Irma, is a changeable and elusive figure. She rejects
him at the book‘s beginning; he pursues her across Europe; they meet again in a
series of locales—the forest, the seashore, the opera—with Toge pleading his case
and Irma undecided. As with Ulysses, the heroine has the last word—in fact, her
words are Molly Bloom‘s (see Figure 2).

Figure 1: Page 38, 305 of A Humument (4th Edition).

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Throughout the book, other characters appear with their original monikers—
Grenville, Toge‘s rival for Irma‘s affections; the mysterious Baroness X, Miss
Markham—and like the names, the language retains a kind of Victorian language
costume. But Phillips undermines its original denotations with suggestive picto-
psychoanalysis, little portraits of the character‘s unbridled ids: the book continually
expresses the desire ―to connect,‖ a phrase which often takes on a sexual overtone.
Figure 2: Pages 257, 366 of A Humument (4th Edition).
Phillips himself cites ―deliberate parallels‖ with an even older text, the 1499
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, printed in Venice by the early Renaissance publisher,
Aldus Manutius and hyperbolically known as ―the most beautiful book in the world‖
for the clarity of its type and the ingenuity of its woodcut illustrations. The
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Hypnerotomachia is full of typographical flourishes known as technopaegnia, or a
confluence of meaning in typographic and lexical denotations—a drinking scene
printed in the shape of goblets, for example. The story is, however, unintelligible, at
least using conventional reading strategies. Though understood as a version of the
romanzo d’amore, the achievement of the language of the Hypnerotomachia
(translated as ―Strife within a Dream‖) is that it resists any kind of totalized
comprehension. Liane Lefaivre describes it as
strange, baffling, inscrutable prose, replete with recondite references, teeming
with tortuous terminology, choked with pulsating, prolix, plethoric passages.
Now in Tuscan, now in Latin, now in Greek—elsewhere in Hebrew, Arabic,
Chaldean and hieroglyphs—the author has created a pandemonium of unruly
sentences that demand the unrelenting skills of a prodigiously endowed
polyglot in order to be understood. (80)

Poliphilo, the hero of the Hypnerotomachia, is as his name indicates endowed with
his multitudinous desires. His story is a tale of Eros run amok. In a series of dreams
and dreams-within-dreams, he chases Polia, the woman who rejected him the night
before the story begins, through a series of mysterious groves and palaces. Along the
way, he falls in love with a number of beautiful nymphs, books, and buildings. In
fact, unable to distinguish appreciation from carnal desire, he praises the architecture
of a temple, then finds the appropriate orifice and inserts himself (one of the
unexpected parallels between the two books is the constant hint of intercourse
between characters, or even between characters and the scenery). Some of the visual
landscapes in The Humument seem deliberate echoes of the gardens and topiaries of
the Hypnerotomachia—a forest, a palm grove, a fountain in a garden—in which
Toge, like Poliphilo, carries out his erotic quests.
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One tableau in particular is strikingly similar: near the end of the book,
Polophilo sits writing a letter to Polia, alone in a room with an open window,
grimacing with the difficulty of it. Likewise, Toge is seen in A Humument, writing to
Irma—in fact literally writing ―Irma‖—near the end of the book. Phillips‘ text reads:
―down, and / up / three ways— / / turbe / / vocat‖ (249). Potentially, we can read this
admixture of language as an echo of the Hypnerotomachia as well. Perhaps ―turbe‖ is
Toge‘s attempt at Latin, close enough to turbae (tumultuous, turbulent) to be an
extension of the first line, which describes a kind of chaotic movement. ―Turbe
vocat,‖ then, is Toge‘s (or Phillips‘s) call to randomness and chaos. And yet, as the
two illustrations show, a profound sense of order is at work here.
Both Toge and Poliphilo inhabit textual worlds continually broken by
technopaegnia: illustrations, indentations, symbols, and a continuing slippage of
meanings. In this shared scene, both characters attempt to communicate through
writing, and what is the result? In Toge‘s case, a tumultuous nonsense, obsessive
repetition. In Poliphilo‘s case, the difficulty of writing overcomes his desire to
communicate. In both scenes, the supposedly simple act of writing is upended, just as
it is in their respective books, by the difficulty of being understood. Language, it
seems, or even multiple languages, is no way to express oneself. But the two men end
up writing, as it were, to each other. And even the method may be similar: notice that
strange writing implement by Poliphilo‘s left hand? It appears to be a knife, not a pen.

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Figure 3: Woodcut from Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, page 249 of A Humument (4th Edition).
So, how to make art? With pen or knife? A Humument restlessly alludes to
and revises past maxims of artistic creation, most persistently on Forster‘s ―only
connect,‖ which echoes and distorts across the book: ―only connect,‖ ―closely
connect,‖ ―merely connect,‖ ―merely accept.‖ The subtle differences in these phrases
bring us back to the question of authorial (lack of) agency: the author‘s attempts at
making connections eventually dissolves into accepting them where they lie. Thus
any reading of A Humument must acknowledge that any meaning the reader finds is
analogous to the process of its composition: a series of allusions and innuendos that
the reader may or may not connect and accept. Among these are visual allusions to
abstract expressionism, Pop art, the British Arts & Crafts movement, and Cezanne. In
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fact, the book‘s true hero is ―art,‖ which is both easier to find—―smart,‖ ―part,‖ etc.—
and more germane to the central philosophical questions that the altered book raises
about the need for authorship, coherence, or plot. Phillips continually refashions the
definition of ―art,‖ until its multitudinous identity only proves the futility of the term:

Figure 4: Page 199, 173 of A Humument (4th Edition).

The question of canonicity is an interesting distinction between Phillips and
Johnson‘s altered texts, just as it will be between the later books in this study, Jen
Bervin‘s Nets and Mary Ruefle‘s Little White Shadow, which alter Shakespeare and a
little-known nineteenth-century American novel. First of all, an altered canonical
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text permits, and even promotes, a doubleness of reading. The lines of Shakespeare
and Milton are always visible, if not on the page, then in our memory, and we read
the altered version not merely as its own form but as the product of an intervention
between us and the original. An alteration of a canonical work is an implicit alteration
to the canon. However, when we have no access to the original—either in memory or
in our library—the rules of reading are somewhat less dependent on the contrast
between the canonical text and an unauthorized rearrangement of it. Encountering the
alteration of an original text which has no meaning to us encourages the notion that it
is the altered version, not the original, which must be worth something.
There are key differences in the definition of value in the altered book and the
altered text. In the altered book prose is made poetry, book made object, object made
art. The book is not only recycled, but made valuable again. In fact, Phillips‘
description of the initial discovery of The Human Document at a used booksellers‘
stall in London is concerned most with its price:
I found, for exactly threepence, a copy of The Human Document by W.H.
Mallock, published in 1892 as a popular reprint of a successful three-decker. It
was already in its seventh thousand at the time of the copy I acquired and cost
originally three and sixpence. I had never heard of W.H. Mallock and it was
fortunate for me that his stock had depreciated at the rate of a halfpenny a year
to reach the requisite level. (Phillips, ―Notes on A Humument”)

―Requisite‖ here refers to the rule Phillips had determined as his sole criterion for a
book to alter: no more than threepence. In his description, Mallock‘s book is given
terms of physical commodity; like a run-down house, the artist sees the potential
value in its renovation and resale. The collector and archivist Marvin Sackner, to
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whom the fifth edition of A Humument is dedicated, introduces the book with the
following account of seeing it for the first time with his wife:
This work imparted a profound delightful, visual and intellectual experience,
and day-dreams about owning this work, which was well beyond our financial
reach (the sale price was listed at the information desk of the Kunsthalle). We
resolved to collect prints made by Phillips which we could afford and to meet
this future star of our collection. (―Humumentism,‖ unpaginated)

For the collector, an appreciation of the art turns seamlessly into a fantasy of
ownership; a reader‘s delight turns quickly into disappointment at not permanently
possessing the work. One might add that the similarities in these two encounters are
striking, and illustrative of the appreciation of the book—in both senses of the word.
Thus, while Phillips has described the potential artistic value of A Human Document
as practically infinite, this infinitude is visible only in a series of physical, tangible
objects, each of which may be discretely priced and sold.

iv. The past tense of Wite-Out is Out-Witted
The exciser‘s purpose is to hide, but in this hiding, a new text is written.
Unless/until the text is erased completely, writing can be accomplished with the
eraser. Or, as in Mary Ruefle‘s altered text, A Little White Shadow (Wave, 2006),
with the brush of the Wite-Out bottle. The title of the source text is the same as the
altered text (and describes the process of alteration as well); the original book was a
small novel published in April, 1889, the title page tells us. The original frontispiece
credits ―E.M.M‖ as its author, yet the full author‘s name has been whited (Witted?)
out, and over the author‘s name, Ruefle‘s signature appears (see Figure 9). This
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autograph reminds us of the handicraft quality of the entire enterprise, and of a
particular change in the kind of art we are perceiving. One does not sign poems,
generally, but a painting must have a signature to guarantee its originality. Since it
borrows from both painting and poetry, the altered
book is often subject to an overlapping set of artistic
criteria which make it difficult to explain its effect
in purely poetic terms. The signature, evidence of
an author‘s hand, is shocking because we expect an
appropriate distance between ourselves and the poet
in order to exercise these critical judgments.
Authors‘ handwriting is confined to original
documents and archival materials, not a mass-
printed edition of poems. A poet‘s ―voice,‖ a term that is itself already a metaphor, is
supposedly apparent in a set of visible poetic particulars: diction, syntax, line length,
forms, and so on (imagine how much more immediate, and how different our sense of
―voice‖ might be if we read each poem in the poet‘s handwriting). Somewhat
paradoxically, the altered book offers this kind of experience: even though the actual
text has been written by someone else, the visibility of authorship is greater than in a
book of standardized print. And perhaps part of the agenda of the altered book is to
make us think about why we should prefer a distant, decontextualized poem to one
handwritten and signed by its author.
Figure 5: Title page of A Little
White Shadow showing Mary
Ruefle‘s signature.

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The signatures also concatenates two eras. The ―nowness‖ that Jacques
Derrida describes in ―Signature, Event, Context‖ is important to the poetics of A Little
White Shadow, whose author is both present and erased. As Derrida states,
a written signature implies the actual or empirical nonpresence of the signer.
But, it will be said, it also marks and retains his having-been present in a past
now, which will remain a future now, and therefore in a now in general, in the
transcendental form of nowness (maintenance). This general maintenance is
somehow inscribed, stapled to present punctuality, always evident and always
singular, in the form of the signature. [...] For the attachment to the source to
occur, the absolute singularity of an event of the signature and of a form of the
signature must be retained: the pure reproducibility of a pure event. (20-21)

As with Coleridge‘s note, the question of who is inextricably tied to the question of
when. These qualities of the signature are true of the altered text as a genre. Unlike
standardized print, the signature, like a glob of Wite-out, retains the evidence of a
singular and human event, even when reproduced. In Ruefle‘s case, her signature
asserts a ―nowness‖ stapled to the twenty-first century, despite the fact that the book‘s
language, as we are meant to perceive, originates in the late nineteenth. The reader
oscillates between these two facts, trying to read the work as both original and
simultaneously altered.
As Craig Dworkin has noted in his discussion of A Humument, the altered
book dramatizes the Wittgensteinian observation of how arbitrary our rules are for
moving through text (91-95). The obvious example is our particular movement of
reading—left to right, top to bottom. The altered text can be read this way, but more
often its reorganizations demand alternate ways of reading. These new readings
depend substantially on interpretive and creative leaps by the reader, asking that we
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consider new ways of putting together clusters and fragments, at once encouraging us
to break the rules of reading and the text itself. Likewise, another rule of written
poems we tend to take for granted is the priority of denotation of words over the
word-as-object. Built into the altered book is the reversal of this rule. A Little White
Shadow is a series of images, not type; the daubs and raised edges of white fluid are
tactile in their appearance. As in A Humument, a degree of the pleasure in reading it is
the visual artistry of its erasures, the sense that the alterations are palpable, bringing
us closer to the aura of an art object rather than the mass production of standardized
print.
A Little White Shadow offers little sense of its nineteenth century story, or
even its original language. Like her signature over the original author‘s, Ruefle‘s
signs her poetic signature over the text: unlike A Humument, suffused with the
oddities of Victorian phrasing, A Little White Shadow sounds, in its syntax, like a
Mary Ruefle poem. For example: ―It was my duty to keep the piano filled with
roses,‖ (10) or ―the flapping white dresses of the fish rising sharply against the sky‖
(17) are made up by words plundered from a source document, but the grammar and
sensibility that connect them are recognizably twenty-first century. The style of
composition is determined, in other words, not by the pre-existing work but by the
author‘s sense of language. Ruefle literally finds her voice in another text.
But the other author haunts the text as well, despite the erasure of her name.
―E.M.M.‖ is Emily Malbone Morgan (1862-1937), a prominent Anglican
philanthropist and founder of numerous ―summer homes‖ for women toiling in the
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mills and factories of Massachusetts and Connecticut. The homes, christened with
names like Heartsease and Beulahland, were meant to serve as a place of relaxation
and spiritual fortification for the young women, offering sleep and prayer in equal
measure. Although a prolific reader and diarist, Morgan approached writing primarily
as a fundraiser, not a novelist. In her diary of 1892, three years after its publication,
Morgan estimates earnings of three hundred dollars from the sales of A Little White
Shadow, enough to rent and furnish a modest house for the summer. Its outer
appearance can be shabby, she allows, ―but inside, the American fondness for fresh
clean paint I sincerely hope will prevail.‖
The original context of its publication provides a kind of parallel to its life as
an altered book. The commoditization Morgan planned for her work has been both
subverted and accomplished in Ruefle‘s project. That is, Ruefle is in a kind of accord
with its original author, who hoped to create spaces where the drudgery of
industrialized life would be replaced with spiritual and intellectual development,
complete with extensive libraries. Ruefle‘s version, in its way, opens a similar space
within the book: paint prevails.

v. Altars where it alteration finds
Also in 2006, Jen Bervin published a small book called Nets, which at first
look like a collection of Shakespeare sonnets published by a printer trying to save on
ink. Most of the text is in 25% grayscale, with a few words and phrases in black.
Sonnet 117, for example, looks like this:
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That I have hoisted sail to all the winds
Which should transport me farthest from your sight.

Bervin‘s project, like its predecessors, is calculated to confuse our reading strategies
and our assumptions about the nature of poetic forms. Encountering it, we
immediately must decide how to read these poems: are we meant to read the entire
sonnet and then the text in bold? Or simply recognize the sonnet before we read the
bold text? In a ―Working Note‖ to the text, Bervin writes,
I stripped Shakespeare‘s sonnets bare to the ―nets‖ to make the space of the
poems open, porous, possible—a divergent elsewhere. When we write poems,
the history of poetry is with us, pre-inscribed in the white of the page; when
we read or write poems, we do it with or against this palimpsest.

This palimpsest is a metaphor for most poets, but Bervin makes it literal: poetry is
actually ―pre-inscribed‖ on the page like an indelible watermark. Within this system,
the poet is limited to the existing vocabulary of the prior poet.
As in the other altered texts, Bervin‘s erasure poems staple the present to the
past. At one point, she finds the events of September 11, 2001 in Shakespeare‘s
Sonnet 64:
When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;

Nowhere else is Bervin‘s method more appropriate to her subject: the twin ―losses‖
remain amid a textual landscape that has itself been razed. One should issue a caveat
here: Bervin is not radically refashioning the significance of Shakespeare‘s sonnet,
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nor is she alone in applying it to 9/11. This sonnet was in fact quoted extensively in
the months afterward, and its third line was used as a title for a commemorative book
of photographs of the towers. But these factors only strengthen Bervin‘s position that
the sonnets are ―pre-inscribed‖ upon the poet when she sits down to write; rather than
resisting the urge to recite Shakespeare, she follows it, partially. And this partiality
makes for a poem that reenacts the fracture of the event.
Perhaps the oddest aspect of Bervin‘s project is the way it seems to combine
an equal reverence for the canonical and the avant-garde. Defining the pre-inscribed
―history of poetry‖ as solely consisting of Shakespeare seems at odds with a
compositional technique following in the footsteps of Dada; one has to wonder what
the book would look like if it were less appreciatory and more subversive. In many
cases, the poems seem to be not altered texts, but texts-as-altar: the original sonnets,
too valuable to be fully effaced, are not only pre-inscribed, but effectively
reinscribed. For example, the treatment of Sonnet 135 points out something that we
already know about Shakespeare‘s poem—namely, that it puns relentlessly on the
author‘s name:

Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,
And Will to boot, and Will in over-plus;
More than enough am I that vexed thee still,
To thy sweet will making addition thus.
Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,
Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?

Shall will in others seem right gracious,
And in my will no fair acceptance shine?
The sea, all water, yet receives rain still,
And in abundance addeth to his store;
So thou, being rich in Will, add to thy Will
One will of mine, to make thy large ‗Will‘ more.
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Let no unkind, no fair beseechers kill;
Think all but one, and me in that one Will.

In this case, our means of appreciation of these puns is frustrated by the way that
Bervin equalizes them. Without context, we have no means of differentiating
different kinds of will, and without the clang of different definitions, we don‘t have a
pun. However, this particular alteration seems to dramatize the central question of the
altered text, which is the question of agency. How much agency does the alterer
assert? How much does she share? Is this project meant as a battle or a confluence of
wills?
If it is meant as a struggle, Bervin never makes a case for dominance. For her,
the position of the alterer is an inferior one. A constant theme of Nets is the relative
superiority of the original, as here in Sonnet 117:
Accuse me thus: that I have scanted all,
Wherein I should your great deserts repay,
Forgot upon your dearest love to call,
Whereto all bonds do tie me day by day;
That I have frequent been with unknown minds,
And given to time your own dear-purchased right;
That I have hoisted sail to all the winds
Which should transport me farthest from your sight.
Book both my wilfulness and errors down,
And on just proof surmise accumulate;
Bring me within the level of your frown,
But shoot not at me in your wakened hate;
Since my appeal says I did strive to prove
The constancy and virtue of your love.

Like a sail, some text has been raised in order to bring one poet within the wake of
another. Professions of poetic inferiority are of course a theme of the sonnets, most
famously in those addressed to Shakespeare‘s rivals (and in nautical terms, too—in
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Sonnet 80, the speaker calls himself a ―worthless boat‖ in comparison to another
poet‘s ―proud main‖). But where Shakespeare turns supposed inferiority into an
occasion to show off his superiority, Bervin asks simply to be brought ―within / the
wake.‖ The de facto position of the alterer is one of power, bringing the original text
to heel with the tip of a pen, eraser, or correction fluid brush. But because Bervin has
made the choice of leaving visible her source text, she seems to be refusing this
position in favor of a more collaborative one. Or, perhaps Bervin‘s project is
explicitly to reject and confuse certain expectations we may have for poetry. The
poetics of Nets is a repudiation of originality in language and form. Even as it creates
its own original forms within the sonnets, it simultaneously offers the entire text to
the reader, inviting the reader to participate and perhaps construct his own alternate
versions. The implication of this project is a radically democratic notion of poetry,
one that treats all language as essentially fungible, recyclable, and unconnected to its
place in time. The value of genius, of Shakespeare‘s singularity, is replaced with what
Bervin calls a ―divergent elsewhere;‖ poems are not what you make of them, but what
can be made from them.
And yet Bervin, like creators of other altered texts, acknowledges the
unbearable influence of ―the history of poetry,‖ which she described as an
inescapable force to be reckoned with, a presence ―preinscribed in the white of the
page.‖ Every time a poet attempts to produce a work of originality, in other words,
she is both dependent upon and trapped by this history; any act of writing is literally
writing over or through these earlier texts. Or, in Harold Bloom‘s aphoristic
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formulation, ―a poem is not a writing, but a rewriting.‖ In this case, textual alteration
is a literal embodiment of Bloom‘s theory of influence, in that the alterer-poet must
break apart the language of the past strong poet in order to make her poem.

vi. Holey Bibles
All of these works—and a few that belong in this lineage that I haven‘t
covered fully or left out, such as Ted Berrigan‘s Whiteout, John Cage‘s mesostics, the
work of Jackson Mac Low, and Burrough‘s cut-ups and fold-ins—imagine the act of
composition as dependent upon the existence of earlier text, so that the act of creation
is a process of editing as much as creating. And though there exists the notion of a
whole beyond these fragments, the composition of the whole is quite different than
for the Romantic or Modernist fragment, which were meant to illustrate a condition of
human life—the first as fallen, but potentially recoverable, the second as broken
permanently. But here ―the whole‖ only leads us to more text, a dream of some stable
meaning in past novels or poems.
And yet we can‘t seem to get away from the Romantic idealization of the
fragment, or at least its language. Consider Philip Metres‘ description of Nets:
Bervin‘s text breaks the urns of the sonnets into their fragmented parts, thus
rendering the ghostly whole wholly ghostly. Bervin‘s poems are like rubbings
of old slate gravestones whose original names and dates have faded into near-
obscurity; the poet, the pencil etcher, wants to retain the artifact through a
kind of representation of it. However, through time and weather, it is possible
only to have a partial version.

Unsurprisingly, the two dominant metaphors for poetry in this description—the
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headstone and the urn—come straight out of Romanticism. And the notion of the poet
as interpreter of the unintelligible monuments of the past is recorded, most famously,
in Keats‘s ―Ode on a Grecian Urn‖ and ―On Seeing the Elgin Marbles.‖ In these
poems fragments are reconciled into meaning—or at least into poetic statements
about beauty, truth, and mortality—but the altered text only offers the fragment itself,
so that the reader herself is in the position of Keats, contemplating each ―imagined
pinnacle‖ of the poem. But instead of beholding a partial vision, Bervin and Johnson
imagine poetry as a ―partial version‖—implicitly, not the only version—of an earlier
text. Bervin‘s description of the page as a palimpsest is anticipated by Thomas De
Quincey, who observed that the literal palimpsests (vellum upon which multiple
manuscripts had been copied and erased) were a natural metaphor for the experience
of reading:
Such a palimpsest is my brain; such a palimpsest, oh reader! is yours.
Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain
softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And
yet, in reality, not one has been extinguished.

In 1813, another inveterate text-alterer was slicing up the book of Matthew
with a razor around the same time West was erasing Coleridge. In Thomas Jefferson‘s
version of the Bible, there is no breaking of bread and body, no drinking of wine and
blood. And no resurrection—the ending lines of the Jefferson Bible are spliced from
two books, James 19:42 and Matthew 27:60:
There they laid Jesus,
and rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed.

90

Jefferson had a theological argument in mind, but he found his bible in the Bible the
way Ronald Johnson and Tom Phillips found their worlds in Milton and Mallock:
cutting away what was unnecessary, and rearranging making the remainder to create
texts that reflected his reading experience. The act of making an incomplete text out
of a complete one, or of finding phrases more true as disjointed fragments than as part
of a seamless flow of language, these preferences for a partial versions of the story—
how do these works speak to (or against) our expectations of poetic form, or of form
in general? What kind of problem is it if poetry can be made from prose, valuable
high culture art object from cheap popular culture commodity? What kinds of
distinction are left? Anne Carson observes, ―The forms are in chaos,‖ and perhaps we
should read that statement not as an observation of the disintegration of form, but the
potential for its recovery. In other words, where else could we possibly find forms but
in chaos? In Radi Os, Johnson finds both man and song there: ―Man // the chosen
/ Rose out of Chaos: / song‖ (3). Phillips‘s narrator, Bill Toge, summarizes the desire
to write as ―turbe vocat,‖ the call to forces beyond the writer‘s control. The altered
text is by definition beyond the writer‘s control (which writer? Doesn‘t matter).
91

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92

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95

Appendix A: Litter

Table of Contents

Epigraph 97
The Oblivion Pact 98

Paper
The Papermakers 100
The Late Address of Captain Shane T. Adcock 101
Poem Ending with an Icepick Lobotomy 103
Foreman 104
A Bed above the Abyss: Amnesiac Notebook 105
The Ice Ship 109
An Unknown Shore: Variations on a Fragment by Oppen 110
Post-Tempest 112
What Would Come to Be Known as ‗The Years of Confusion‘ 113
Don‘t Write At All 115
The Professions of St. Augustine 116
Apology Ending with Stunned Sparrow 121
Coverage 123
Attila the Hutt 124
Ode (with Fragments) on the Snowplant 126
Rae‘s Mask 128

Weight
Horrible Steep 130
Purgatorio 131
On the Third Day 133
Canary 134
Keats, Climbing 135
Off Great Point 136
Cloud Effects: Variations on a Fragment by Coleridge 137
House, Home, Echo 138
Lumens 139
Elegy for a Stunt Horse 141
Keats, Listening to Van Morrison 142
Sarcophagus 143
Aeolian 145

96

Fireweed along the Angeles Crest 146
At the Courthouse 147
Meditation Ending Beside A Chasm 148
Senses of the Afterlife 149
Postscript 150
References 151

97

And they can be pieced together, after much puzzlement, to form a most terrible structure. But, on the
other hand, what items of our world cannot?
– BEN MARCUS, ―A Failure of Concern‖

98

The Oblivion Pact

Nothing recorded, nothing recalled—
I shook his hand and showed the palm—
nothing held, nothing harmed

our smiles gun another boy down
who had it coming. The future
we will build it will build
his memorial ourselves

a river is all we need
to forget these past lives
its mouth empties teeth and bone

our handshake rises up and fells
an axe through knots of tendon.

The war has been important to anatomy
the doctor says our understanding
of phantom limbs has grown

He says Nothing
can come after nothing—
true, but not for long
99

Paper

100

The Papermakers

Art older than Christ, its rags more colorful,
its watermark two hands open to receive a gift:

a piece of silver, a blank check, the universal sign
for alms. During the weeping, the hand-wringing,

wet pages began falling, leafing through saturated air
curling around survivors‘ arms as they wilted

under the white heat of the sky dome.
In the exposed roots of the oaks, in the rigging of boats

sunk in their berths, upon the archipelago
of rooftops, an endless supply of fresh sheets

tiling the muddy water, delicate flagstones
offering the solace of the idea of disaster

as a clean page, a baptismal current of paper,
God‘s great pulpy torrent ripping,

running bodies through a sieve of cyclone fence.
So we pinned the first page to the first found:

art older than Christ, finding something
to write with and on at the insistence of the dead.

101

The Late Address of Captain Shane T. Adcock

o
Today I am consecrated, yet I would rather be anything
but king today—I would chew through this plastic bag to feel
a solitary drop of rain dampen my remains—
killed and redeemed by a button, a white glove,
an honor guard flanking my caisson, whose wheels weep.

o
My widow, a black blossom opening—

o
I have no shield, no solace, no uniform,
only the brass buttons my eyes have become,
the formal silver of bit and bridle—
today I am among regal animals, a militia of angels:
my forefathers‘ eyes bled through cornhusk bandages at Antietam,
watched the yellow silk fly on San Juan hill, checked the battleship‘s clock
every quarter hour. Grandfather, who taught me Norfolk time—
eight bells and all’s well—by the Tigris they tore your watch from my wrist.

o
We never know when light will hit us next,
we who endowed with nightvision no longer press ears to the ground
or noses to the air, but flatten the mountains to maps,
light into lasers, roll along the hard road like a ball inside a ball,
unaware that its own revolution may be contrary to its direction.
No event ever stops spinning, despite our efforts the hands can‘t grasp
or push out of mind the slow rise of the spirit,
the falling of the bucket, the washed-out sky, a vision
seen from the bottom of a well.

o
The bucket brings up sand, the wells are fiery columns
supporting a palace of smoke and charred air—
these late eclipses of the sun and moon portend no good to us,
our intent eclipsed by incident, our knowledge appearing only in outline,

102

decorated by its absence. Dismissed from life by a Reason,
I had class, civility, and a beautiful eye.

o
She can‘t forget
how she forgets. The people I resembled have changed—
lost my detail, my currency, converted to a small round coin
thrown into the fountain of grief. In her dream, she is racing away
from a runaway caisson, and it crushes her.

o
I am almost gone, yet engraved here in the earth,
tally and tower, wheel and whetstone for a sharpening darkness.
A blade trenches the ground, and names pass through its wound,
casting their shades like the noise of invisible planes, a sound
heard underneath a thousand others.

o
The long note of a trumpet, dampened by rain.

103

Poem Ending with an Icepick Lobotomy

Laid out in a white envelope,
I heard his bone hammer,

the tapered orbitoclast
a silver letter opener

sliding between gummed flaps,
a crack of daylight between hollow

and tissue, an entrance of instrument,
the bulbs smashed in their sockets.

Lions, water, the dark—
they said I was scared of everything

unreal. Even then, informally arranged
on the dining table, I admit

to dreaming
when the dull pencil intruded.

Nights, I have been to the river,
I have seen the eyes of lions

bright with menace.
Then I lay on the bank,

counting stars.
Then there were none.

104

Foreman

In the box were the victim‘s garments, stiff with blood.
He had been hogtied with duct tape,
silver bands still shone at wrist and ankle—

now we have to wear them, said the foreman,

so we did, one by one stepping inside
until the shirt billowed like a great red tent
as we held it overhead with our palms,
and the pants were like two long hallways
we walked for days between our verdict,

and as we gathered at the round table
we began to forget who we were
on the outside, each name lost to the eraser
of days that passing through the courtroom—

until a show of hands was called for, said the foreman,
and we did, one by one, each empty, shackled to the other.

105

A Bed above the Abyss: Amnesiac Notebook

i. Awake

Each entry consisting of the statements
I am awake or I am conscious
entered every few minutes:

2:10 P.M: this time properly awake.
2:14 P.M: this time finally awake.
2:35 P.M: this time completely awake.

At 9:40 P.M. I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims.

This in turn was crossed out, followed by:

I was fully conscious at 10:35 P.M., and awake for the first time in many, many
weeks.

This in turn was cancelled out by the next entry.
106

ii. Passport

How large it grew, that first kiss, until I could board it each night,
a raft drifting out into the quiet lake. After twenty years
the great amnesiac HM never recognized
his doctor, and after lunch
gladly ate another: Time for lunch, they would tell him again.
You must be starving.

God, I am starving.
Without a body, collection cannot precede
recollection: recollect a tongue, that skilled swirl
of its quick tip, a mouthfull of familiars: smoke,
strawberry candy. Memory in the web
between dumbstruck and dura: dump and dune,
duplicates. What kind of game is this?

I‘m no longer a boy,
HM would say to his reflection, the surprise on his face
genuine. What kind of game is this?
The mirror a passport like any other, its picture
out of time, a foreign shock of untamed hair
even the photographer declared beautiful then.

Then: the word smiles
like a stranger on your first day at school,
sitting on stone steps, worn with use.
107

iii. Taxonomy

“Red but not bird comes to mind.‖
Only the kingdom of living names

was missing there—bank, flagstone, sofa
remained, but not the blur at the feeder,

the undersea creature on the card—
it‘s a danger, a killer swimmer,

they coaxed him—it‘s called a
(waiting for the word to stir from its depth;

how could he forget the ones who dressed,
fed, taught him word by word

the order of the world? What noise does
that loss make?) (They looked suspiciously

like his parents, he thought: strangers posing
unanswerable questions)—

―It has no name, it has no need.‖
108

The Ice Ship

Pyke, from his Massachusetts madhouse,
envisioned it
as a divine craft, an Ark impervious to torpedoes.

ICE is with us, ICE will win this war,
he wrote
Mountbatten. With a draft of one hundred and fifty feet,

two million tons displacement, it could carry
one hundred
twin-engine planes, three thousand men,

and required no steel to assemble,
only water and pulp.
Onboard, the men lived in cork-paneled cabins,

skated down corridors to deliver urgent messages.
A miracle ship,
organically arisen from the element

it moved in, indistinguishable from its medium,
formed by Nature‘s design,
not the Royal Navy‘s. Even her weaponry

resembled God‘s own: ―brine guns‖ which
encased the enemy
like straw in glass, or a machine that blocked harbors

with a flotilla of icebergs. Churchill himself approved
draining White Bay
for its construction and diverted all the empire‘s cork

109

immediately to Canada, where a prototype
built by conscientious
objectors lasted through the summer,

disguised as a boathouse. By then Allies
had landed
in France, and the project was scrapped—

Mountbatten, threatening to lock him up again,
would pay no attention
to a new plan for smuggling assassins

into Berlin in boxes marked ―Officers Only‖
on the grounds
that Germans were an obedient race.

Love and duty stir men to action, but war
makes us dream:
the morning of his suicide Pyke shaved his beard,

head. Outside, wet snow fell hard against
the city,
as though to clear it for another world.
110

An Unknown Shore: Variations on a Fragment by Oppen

Cortez arrives.
he is absolutely lost
at an unknown shore.
and he is enraptured

(this is the nature of poetry

The poem:

Cortez arrives at an unknown shore
he is absolutely lost
and he is enraptured

Cortez arrives at an unknown shore
he is utterly lost
but he is enraptured

Cortez arrives too late.
the shore is absolutely barren, the men lost
to starvation and rapture

Cortez utters:
―lost.‖

(this is the nature of description

Cortez walks upon the beach.
the ocean is as still as a map
spread out on a table.

111

(he takes a nap.

Cortez arrives, sun-senseless (?
wrapped in gold
plashing in the shallow

All the Cortezs arrive.
all the waves arrive

(this is the nature of disaster
112

Post-Tempest

Consider the blue, formerly blewe
skye, still the bleween, blowne
skye, the sky from which
clouds are blown,
dispersed.

Consider the blue sea, formerly blewe
sae which contains placid zee,
and perilous sjar, the tempestuous sea
on whose shore emerges
our empire of
anachronism.

When we lay down in the field
flowers Shakespeare called chimneysweeps
waved their solemn clocks.
The sky had changed
when we woke unable
to name this feeling:

a new breeze
come from Portugal,
or the familiar scythe
lifting the white globes
out of sight.
113

What Would Come to Be Known as ‘The Years of Confusion’

I. Prejulian
In those days, no name was given to the abyss
beyond the year‘s end.
When the unnumbered next thing lay fallow

in the razed fields we paused to shine
our blades
until the first march of the new campaign,

our ―st ate of permanent pre-hostility‖ lasting
sixty days.
Even the emperor quieted His hands, which carried

within a thousand strategies for taking
open terrain.
No food grew in this blank season blessed

by no god, no good came from the field of cold mud.
The void displeased Him—
conquest an appetite which expands or dies—

not yet longing for death
he annexed it
to his eponymous calendar.

II. Thursday
Now we live where there is morning every day
with a different name.
I must have woken into one at the given hour,

pushed away the heavy blankets—but without light,
without a single
helpful shadow to tell one plane from another,

114

yesterday and tomorrow press me
like a specimen
between them. Outside the glass, an edgy truce

is holding up between dread
and giddy abandon,
but in the washed out plain of no man‘s land,

the last empire is struck
like a cheap set.
Against this background the new year

emerges, dragging its sash, its still-bleeding tattoo
a prayer for peace,
whose precondition is the end of time.
115

Don’t Write At All

Today the commencement of yearly rites.
Today a blimp overhead.
Today the brass tacks, the clean sheets.

Today the difficult poses: Bird of Paradise,
Standing Half-Moon, Flowering Wheel.
At the Buddhist retreat in Idyllwild
a man walks slowly back from breakfast.

He has missed lunch he is so slow.
Flies gather all over him.

A fly which Buddha forbids killing
crawls deep into his ear,
rippling the clear surface of his mantra.
A fly explores the pitted stone of his brain.

Today the intrusion of fireworks, the traded insults.
Today the sharp knuckle.
Today the hair-trigger, the shirtless boy
ready to burst in the heat, flying downcourt
in jeans loose as robes, leaping into white space

between obscenities. What today
is killed on the page still survives
in the world where no one reads.
116

The Professions of St. Augustine

i. Of Love & Language

I wanted to carry out | my inner lack | of feeling | which I had in plenty | I
sought | the excitement of | color | to shake | and carry off the | night | what
was | at the bottom of | my heart | let my heart tell | I loved my | self | down
from | firmament to ruin | for its own sake | There is beauty in | such things |
the body touches | much significance attaches | the other senses | have their
own | urge to self-assertion | one must not depart from | this world | in its
beauty and its | objects | of love and | language

117

ii. Of Flesh & Blood

ship | secretly | weeping | to sail | I | then asked, | prayed for | make me |
shore | lost to our sight | The wind blew | nations and groans | ambitious
desires | an end to | flesh and blood | a means of | lament | remnants of | me
and | home. | the longing | to use my absence | survived | And yet after | I
came to Rome | bearing all | against myself | the | disposition to | deliver me
from | the death of | flesh | I was | numerous and serious | forgiven |
delivered | contracted by my | flesh | insofar as | my soul | was marked by all-
night dancing.

118

iii. Of Limited Humanity

suffering so long from | certainty | I should have knocked | to discover | more
painfully | uncertain things | you made humanity | whole and never limited |
no bodily | head to foot | shame | they were certain | it was certain | as certain
when | against you | I was being‖ ―the body | of space | in the shape of the
human | all sides and confined | the old writing | looked absurd, | with an eye |
to attack | The letter | the mystical veil | difficulty; | I kept my heart

119

iv. Of Childish Error

our physical shape | limited to | Being ignorant | as an infant | bounded on all
sides | from head to foot | with blind accusations | being turned around | as if
they thought | the spirit gives life | within the shape of the human | uncertain
and | infantile | attack | I had mindlessly repeated | Christ‘s | childish error |
My concern to discover what | did not hold | an infant | taken literally, seemed
to contain | promises of certainty | I was confused | I was also pleased | when
the old writings | most carefully enunciating a principle | a vast and huge space
| of exegesis: | the letter kills | what I could hold for certain
120

v. Of an Empty Office

we were mistaken in | our pupils | we hesitate to knock at | the shape of a
human body | whose patronage we need | Great hope has been aroused | by
allowing | the soul | vain and empty office | to pay | our problem | But put
aside | significance | set aside | the deity | in quality and in quantity | the
body‘s | the soul‘s | small sweetness | Death itself | is a question | it may
suddenly carry us off

121

Apology Ending with Stunned Sparrow

I observed that the very fact they were poets made them think they had a perfect
understanding of all other subjects, of which they were totally ignorant.
– PLATO, ―T HE
APOLOGY‖
Perfect understanding
is the poem
we can‘t write,

despite our distance
from the subject.
And yet we gather

experience into nests
of likeness
and die inside. There is no

outside the nest
(this is our philosophy)
only the sound of fitch

and its synonymous flock:
vetch, plait, polecat,
―to move in small spurts.‖

Each is correct
(this is our problem)
but like a city, we believe

only our own. Last night
I stood under the window
of the city, tossing gravel—

igneous, crystalline, fundamental—
while inside they studied geology,
an apology for dust.

122

No, Glaucon, perfect understanding
must be beat
into our heads, until they ring

like an iron bell
in the abandoned church
struck by a random bird:

perfect ignorance, music
unheard by its maker.

123

Coverage

The flames had almost reached the hospital, she‘d have to be quick. She
ran through the empty ward, stripping bedclothes from the cots, and
crammed them in the industrial sink with the cold water going full blast.
Meanwhile, she made her way through the aisles of cribs, unhooking lines
from their tiny limbs. The smoke was boiling through the hall vents as
she retrieved the dripping laundry and began wrapping them in wet
blankets, dropping each thick bundle into a pillowcase. Some were so
small she could fit three inside. She laid the bulging sacks on the damp
sheets and knotted its corners, the way a cartoon hobo keeps his
belongings. She turned to face the fire and her glasses splintered. Outside
the building, the doctors‘ cars melted to unrecognizable shapes. Later,
their owners would argue over who owned which lump of melted metal.
Insurance money was on the line; two of them—radiologists—actually
came to blows.
124

Attila the Hutt

One thing’s for sure / We're all gonna be a lot thinner.
―Han Solo

Perhaps history is an enormous trash compactor
we are stuck inside
no one bone can be separated

from the others,
no record or television set
can be distinguished
from the vellum and worsted stuff

falling continually
into the open lid
of a century in which the obsolete—

opera, formal declarations of war—
smash into courtly love poetry,
jewel cases. In this space, ever shrinking
empires meet and deform,

fictional and historic
skylines are brought
down by force

to basic vertical and horizontal
lines in a tension
beautiful as long as it lasts, until

you turn away
and cannot. We worried
a loss of knowledge
would make us dumb

125

when an excess has the same effect,
so many packages

the floor disappears,
so many books
the reader has no time to read,
but can only watch, blankly

the walls now beginning to shift,
the floor rising up
making him the middle part

of a trilogy he is compelled to follow,
as it follows
himself as himself,
barely recognizable.
126

Ode (with Fragments) on the Snowplant

i.
We‘re no Sapphos, simply saprophytes: not
able to use the sun‘s gift of bright intro-
spection. We can‘t synthesize, but can we
solve this springy light?

I was green all season, I took photos by the
book—I stared down, deferential, at my future:
ground, until I tasted rotting underleaves, until you
showed me how to trade

Death and Decay for the blood shade, O
negative, in your petal pulse. Red life might
stream again, and thou be chloroformed—
Scarlet, I rebuke, it‘s a clever

Rouge, but it only works if you dye
all the way to the roots. What keeps us
blooming is the old material, not the mulchy
promise of your mouth.

Nourished by rehashing old litter, you go
underground, cave in. Your sense of décor
lightens the mood with patterns, weaves,
new camouflage.

Lyric tulips carpet your crypt, decorating
winter‘s wraparound wall. See—here you are,
snowbound, trying to make the heart‘s dead and dying
matter matter:

127

ii.
*
No one captures more in their cape than you,
Hood: stem to stamen, you‘re right as Spring rain.
*
Winter‘s body, rehashed to pulp, hatches
hungry, giddy, ravenous, ?
stumbles across the dead landscape underfoot
ricochet off trees
*
Shaggy scent of decay, mind‘s metaforgery
*
Spring‘s the time for sprouting things: verdure (root:
verd, from Obsolete French) vernal—see ―Romantic
Ode to X‖—you signify a bloomer, a bloody
platter of hearts.

128

Rae’s Mask

Your advice was good; you tried to take it.
You tried remaking the house he left.
Choosing among Walnut, Ebony, Natural Wood.
Choosing among Orb, Cannonball, Hammered Sphere.

What shape the world just before the light?
The ghost of love just passing through, passing through
brown boxes full of housewares. (Was he housewary?)
Not joking, it’s work every goddamn day you said,

even with his pants down and the ghost lips still sucking.
The walls were sound, they could sand away—
on went the mask—and last choices: China Ash, Ivory Pallor,
Navajo Parchment. New resolutions stuck

between old coats: Make time for your self-
preservation. Find new words for fuck.
129

Weight
130

Horrible Steep

Gloucester. When shall I come to th’ top of that same hill?
Edgar. You do climb it now. Look, how we labor.
– King Lear, IV.6
Feel the cold spray of stars on your cheek,
taste the sliver of moonlight
gouged from its case. How horrible
orbital the ground, how lonely the shivering

cries of coyotes, the dry wind called oblivion sweeping
the ridge‘s familiar silhouettes of rock:
the Old Woman‘s long face, the Headstone
crowned with stars. At the end‘s edge, the cliff writes

its own description of the ships, the tiny lights, your life
startling an owl from a branch above—
caesura of breath, then I begin as actor, an Edgar
in the howling manner of a beggar

draping your broken body
in this false report a coat of wings.

131

Purgatorio

non per vista, ma per suono é noto (Inferno, XXXIV)

I spent a year there, searching for the right line,
trying to translate that long silence
into sight: neither darkness nor brightness

but snow falling on snow, the radio losing strength
in the tunnel. Even static has its edges, its windows.
Even the truth can be dressed in curtains, trees, a forest,

a fortress. Underneath, my mountain was pathetic:
man-made, catastrophic, it could hardly bear
weight, its summiteers barely cared if I blessed

or damned them. I never imagined my tragedy
would be so full of extras, spinning chairlifts,
ascending without effort into the empyrean,

or that the scene itself would have no season,
clocking a few bitter hours of winter, then a spring
so warm we could have swum. In an unconsolidated space

nothing connects, and you slide. Who said it?
I heard a voice in the airport, on the red paging phone:
the king will come early to his idyll, and die

with a smile on his face. The archetypes will not
hold, I heard the radio say, I heard the first canto
of avalanche safety say the odds are zero, o, o, o, o

and our job is recovery, not rescue.
So I spent a January sun, handling shovel and probe,
close-reading layers of snow—rickety, slippery

as a stack of small books, red pages, green. My beacon
calls out, bat-blind, to the body, as the child‘s game

132

you‘re getting colder, colder, no—now you‘re hot,
hotter, you‘re so hot you‘re on fire, you‘re burning—
and there it was. A face, encased in a second face,

a mask of ice, his breath. In an unconsolidated space,
death is half the story. We wrapped him in silver,
laid him in the litter. A numb remembrance

of the knots still chills my hands. It was all by the book,
I remember: the sled, the rope, the weight, the boots.
The world read into, each object animated

by the same unbelievable sight, indelible
as the range of light: the calm town of stone
where we gather each spring around the marker we made,

we made it resemble (how could we not) a mountain.

133

On the Third Day

We called off the search,
and the weary climbed down from the glacier
with their dogs exhausted in the spring sun
too tired to eat the ice in their paws.

We had called his name, procedurally,
a ritual that kept us moving: in the high bowls,
their stunted pines predating the flood,
in the steep ravines sliding loose with scree,
loudly at first, then speaking it to each other
then spelling it out on forms required by law.

It is a form of praying, he claimed, to walk
to the white edge and lean.
Every time, the reply comes clear as a stone
aimed at our thin crowns. It misses
almost every time, humming as it goes.
134

Canary

Gone crazy a little,
I hunt the house for something yellow.

Not in closets, drawers, cabinets.
Not on walls, floors, no trace in the white
paints, the smooth wood, the open sky.

No flower or vine in the greenery.
Neither lemon nor banana.
Not in the pens brimming over cups.

Surviving on snowmelt and juniper, the hermit
found himself with an appetite for mud,
his liver crying out for iron. He ate until
he drank, drank until he split open.

Craving beyond sense, pulling out wires,
checking their bellies for a pale stripe.
The coward is connected to the ground:
the mind designs its reasons, then
shuts the bathroom door. Inside, I found
a late leaf, edged with red: some ending,
a doctor‘s circular messages wound around a bottle.
Inside, the pills wait, a road edged with lights
between here and there, blinking caution.
135

Keats, Climbing

The lost peak weighs heavy on him the weeklong trip
home from Fort William, its damp hand on his breastbone.
False summits, false ends, false altars of breath ascending
toward the sun, its old teeth gnawing at cloud-kept frost,
frigid mud engulfing each foot on the winding mudtrack.
The worst conditions in the world and only a whiskey muffler—
let this dram of gasping go down easy, a little gulp of fire
swing a censer between ribs—summits vaporating upon arrival,
summits sinking upon approach—as a dream destroyed
by grasping its tattered jacket, inurning what‘s left—
one ragged vision inside another, as the rinds of ruined lung
the surgeon excised, held: a wonder he breathed at all.
136

Off Great Point

In a room of changing light we let the island wash away.
I saw a steeple where rip waves met over the sandbar,
a ripple where the bone lands amid the ash, a wake made
by we who live to cast that life in. A cloud overhead
broken into branches by the chop: blue, white swells
slapped the hull, dash these our last remarks—here
the minister arose to say he died as a boy, awoke on shore,
and never swam again. There are no trees here, he intoned,
since they became the boats: there are no trees here,
but there are tree-shaped absences. As though these
shadows, with infinite skill, could be assembled, float.
137

Cloud Effects: Variations on a Fragment by Coleridge

It was not a mist, nor quite a cloud
but passed smoothly on towards the Sea
smoothly and lightly betwixt Earth & Heaven
so thin a cloud it scarce bedimmed the star that shone behind
one blue-black cloud
stretched, like the heavens over all the cope of Heaven

a cloud upon which I had pinned all my hopes
I scarce recognized as a cloud
so threadbare and frayed yet still its own self
discrete, as one cloud amid a mass of clouds
moves our eye to describe a figure amid other figures

a dose of clouds
not a dream of clouds but a dream cloud
not the memory nor imagination but a cloud
passing smoothly between them, and though I felt a shadow
looking up I could see no cloud
neither here on Earth nor in Heaven nor in the in between

where an unwritten epic of clouds smoothly dissipates
into imagination and the Sea and the one
whose Name casts a shadow over all names
138

House, Home, Echo

I count them every evening, tiny fish
lit with phosphoresce, a school of lights
along the curving hilltop road
where I walk each house is a small globe
of incandescent fire where a mother
now sets down a plate of food before her child
so gently it does not make a sound
though the wind stirs its dark green border
of leaves. And because I once lived
inside a house, I know that to enter again
means entertaining one world
with another, leaving one day for another
until the lock wears out with its turning
and the swinging motion of the door
is a warm hand on your cheek
but also the waving
of a crowd on the high decks
of a great ship, leaving for another country.

139

Lumens

i. Crows

On the dark road
a deeper dark your headlights
won‘t dispel—wing by wing
just before the car passes

taking flight, then swirls,
collects,
settles again,
keeping a room of night
open in the dawn.

ii. Cabin

At rest.
There are no footprints to it
yet, no marks
in the new snow.

Like the lake below, it is less
part of the world
in winter, when dark trees

crowd the house—they are
the house—
and the fire inside.

140

iii. Song for a First Night

I hung my coat above
the stove, began to make
a fire. Snow slid down
its shoulders, hissing
on the dusty iron.

By and by, I began
to warm. Even the sun
was once born, a great coat
hung, frozen stiff in the shape
of someone.

141

Elegy for a Stunt Horse

In another age, this house was a barn; the garden a graveyard;
the grave was for Muggins, ―Greatest H orse
of a Generation.‖ The stone said so,
softly, sanded away by our shoes.

We said Mornin, Muggins, and off to school we went.
We said Evenin, Muggins, and thought of dinner.

Once I found a tooth, long as my finger, rounded by a long life
of browsing, a brown blade
in the garden,

relic of the pasture preceding the homes, when the city
was barely a dry rustle in the grass
rolling down to the sea.

Mornin, Muggins, and picked up the paper.
Evenin, Muggins, and turned on the television
where the war had just begun to drop.

They call it an era, but they were days at the time,
revelations distinct as bones.
One night, the sound of gunfire; another,

geese huddled in the alley, cackling. Like a bullet,
they had to land somewhere. The war came
to school, adding guns to the equation.
Don‘t dress red in Oakwood, Muggins,
they‘ll skin you alive, we said.

Flood lights were raining from helicopters,
the streets thick with feathers.
Goodbye, Muggins, we said, and fled uphill,
leaving our teeth, our boys, our geese

flying together around the ring, performing
their stupendous acts of balance
on the back of a galloping bay.

142

Keats, Listening to Van Morrison

Strange entanglement of singing, a twin voice
Stoned me like the nightingale

close enough it touched his ears then came closer, a vine
Stoned me like the hand missing arm

stretching out I into as many syllables as it pleases—
Stoned me like a god’s lung, seared by song

but where does the air come from, when all is said
Stoned me like the exhale of a blue burden, bright red

at once, where does the breath go when it leaves?
Stoned me like the stone’s imprint upon a lake
143

Sarcophagus
i.m. J.B., M.D., J.C., M.R.

1
Pennies hammered edge-wise
into the pine across the climbers trail—
touch them for luck—
only a fire will dislodge them.

2
Route index:
The Meat Slicer, The Lacerator.
The Coffin, The Mummy, Crack of Doom.
The Guillotine, The Sword, The Shield.
The Pillar of Pain, The Jolly Roger,
The White Spider. Or Serenity Crack,
Rainbow Buttress, Eagle Dance.
The Regular Route, the Scenic Route, the Original
Route. The East Face, the North Arch.
The Western Front. The Japanese Variation,
The Swiss Arete. The Hungarian Direct.

3
In the summer, your radical ghosts toured
the flatlands of living cities,
basking in church-conditioned mornings.
Awake my soul, and with the sun
pushing your shopping carts through warehouses
of provisions. From warm air
to warm pools, thy precious time misspent, redeem.

4
A group of spectators on the hotel balcony, watching
a soloist half-way up the grey face, motionless
as the distant waterfall behind him. Watching
as they might a bear: something left of the wild,
after all. Murmurs of disbelief. Then, observing the rules,

144

tossing trash into the correct bins,
they mount into cars, the menacing sun left behind.

5
Route Index, cont’d:
Coxcomb, Moose Tooth, Rooster Tail,
Whale‘s Back, Limp Dick, Angel Wings.
Ten Pin, Thimble, Smokestack, Washington Column.
The Finger of God, Cloud Tower, Higher Cathedral.
Devil‘s Thumb, Necromancer, Sorcerer‘s Cap.
Unnamed Pyramid, Nameless Spire, Pointless Peak.

6
Above shines the diamond
dark with mineral, fossil, fear.
Men live there in ecstasy—they gleam at night
in the crack between worlds:
widening from a thin scar to finger-width
to a hand, a fist, a knee,
to gulp the willing whole.

145

Aeolian

Across the city, a network of grief uncurls
its fingers, plucking friend after friend
with news.

In one book, as long as we can say
this is the worst, we are wrong.

In another, each event is attended
by the unseen
agents of some larger cause,

and even the worst falls
fall to reason, in order
to stand for something.

Two people in a room full of books
talking with their hands, sharing a grief
that is language.

In one book, air blows through
everything—
the paperweight is more comprehensible

than the paper. In another,
crickets have eaten away the margins,
a few choice phrases.
146

Fireweed along the Angeles Crest
for Mason

Outbreak of touchable blaze, reconsideration of flame
in slower terms, yet still akin—
you spring up, spread, can‘t be contained—

purple blooms around the guardrails
helixed by heat. Pioneer of wreckage,
your first-born shoots arise in the scalped hillside

to overtake the proud bones of houses, barns,
fence posts tangled in laceworks of lacquered wire—
the ended, mending world, cindered and flowering.

We have arrived at the other side of discretion.
This is where we stop and go on foot. In the fire

garden, lilac fists of the grief weed grow chest high.
Burnt branches snap underfoot, invisibly, we three:
you and I and the ghost no one knows like we know.

147

At the Courthouse

The forms are pink, yellow, blue
as salmon, canaries, wildflowers
or birth, marriage, death,

flowering beside the window.
Outside the building cars creep on a cloverleaf,
that knot of road built to wish us well.

Good luck, little fish.
Inside, we have nothing
but time and anger.

Born swimming, loved singing,
died blooming. The three birds
fly away into stones of abstraction.

At the window, she says to try again.
Here: paper and pen. But hard as I press,
the copy underneath (the one

she says ―to keep‖) remains a blank blue sea.
On the sixteenth floor, salmon leap,
a canary sings in the bluebells—

and from a door down the hall,
someone will emerge soon
with the form to record it all.
148

Meditation Ending Beside A Chasm

First empty the room of possessions.
Loaded into wheelbarrows, beds

of busted chevys, shopping bags
tied with rags onto horse & mule,

send each on its course.
Now don‘t move an inch, but leave

your mind & stream like refugees
across the border of yourself. Try to make peace

by closing your eyes, seeing only
your mantra scorched in the dark,

floodlit. Then turn off the lights—
take out the bulbs.

Let your head be empty
as a crater filling with rainwater.

Picture yourself as the space
where a house once stood

a wind
blowing through the body‘s stubble field.

And after wind, the silence
from which music may be born.

149

Senses of the Afterlife

A park, described by a river
low and limned by autumn leaves.

From the great brewery upstream
the scent of yeast scatters across empty ballfields.

The sour taste of its bread in every breath
a sustenance like a sniff

from the emptied bottle that held his whiskey.
There are no ships inside, but poured out

in full, heavy with spores,
this wind could raise a stone.

150

Postscript

Think of the moon, the rest of it. Singing,
a new bird began outside my window
to encircle my sleep with a song like spring,
ripeness overtaking the green. Awake,

I wished for the visions I hear are going around:
the dead returning to stroke my hand, open
my eyes to their voices‘ inaudible music,
the negative version of the gaunt moon,

an itch in my shoulders where the wings sprout
at the sound of song, a benediction from legibility.
Then a plume of guilt, knowing there is nothing
I don‘t form through the reach of writing

your last words, the final note still missing,
your song without end (forgive me) I end.

151

ii. References

An Unknown Shore: Variations on a Fragment by George Oppen. The opening stanza
comes from an unpublished series of fragments included in George Oppen: Selected
Poems (New Directions, 2003).

The Late Address of Captain Shane T. Adcock. Captain Adcock, 27, of
Mechanicsville, Virginia, died on October 11, 2006, in Hawijah, Iraq. He was
buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery.

Ode on the Snowplant. The sarcodes sanguinea appears in the Sierra Nevada mountains
in the spring, pushing its bright red stalk through the old snow. Lacking
chlorophyll, it lives by parasitizing the roots and decaying bodies of other plants.
The italicized line in this poem is from John Keats‘s poem fragment ―This living
hand.‖

The Ice Ship. The best story of this episode is in David Lampe‘s book, Pyke, the
Unknown Genius (London: Evans Brothers, 1959).

Professions of St. Augustine. All the language of these poems is taken from Henry
Chadwick‘s translation of Augustine‘s Confessions (Oxford, 1991), and was
composed with Amaranth Borsuk.

Cloud Effects. The fragments from Coleridge‘s are found in Anima Poetae, a
collection of unpublished notebooks edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge
(Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1895).

A Bed above the Abyss. This account is taken from Oliver Sacks‘ article, ―The
Abyss,‖ that appeared in The New Yorker, September 24, 2007.

Poem Ending with an Icepick Lobotomy. From 1936 to 1957, Dr. Walter Freeman
pioneered and popularized this procedure, in which the doctor drove an
instrument—initially an icepick, later a specialized tool called an orbitoclast—
into his patients‘ eye sockets, separating the prefrontal cortex from the rest of the
brain. His youngest patient, Howard Dully, was referred by his stepmother for
the following reasons: ―He obje cts to going to bed but then sleeps well. He does
a good deal of daydreaming and when asked about it he says ‗I don‘t know.‘‖

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Through 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.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Allport, Andrew (author)

Core Title Partial arts: Poetic obsessions with the fragment

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature

Publication Date 04/15/2010

Defense Date 03/02/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Anne Carson,Brenda Hillman,Coleridge,form,fragment,fragment poem,Keats,Kubla Khan,OAI-PMH Harvest,Poetry,romanticism,Tom Phillips

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor St. John, David (committee chair), Habinek, Thomas N. (committee member), Irwin, Mark (committee member), Muske-Dukes, Carol (committee member), Russett, Margaret (committee member)

Creator Email allport@alum.dartmouth.org,allport@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2928

Unique identifier UC1471401

Identifier etd-Allport-3503 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-312691 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2928 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Allport-3503.pdf

Dmrecord 312691

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Allport, Andrew

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu