Pieces of things. The world is scattered with them. If we are attracted to fragments at all perhaps it is in the same way that we are attracted to the scraps of civilizations, pottery shards, a child’s beads in an ancient grave, the lost and missing, the incompleteness of ourselves. Leonardo’s question, which appears so often in his Notebooks, “Is anything ever finished?” seems to echo from every surface. The business of being races on to the next event, or task, or moment, leaving behind what was only just begun. Forms are readily abandoned or moved aside—even the most elegant organic ensembles—what seems done is soon undone, as if everything is subject to some central, uncompromising process seemingly without a conclusion, or one of any duration.

Although there is a literature of the fragment which consists largely of the remains of` works no longer extant, usually gathered by period and region; those collections left to us by fragmentists, like Baehrens’ Fragmenta Poetarum Romanorum, or Muratori’s Antiquitates Italicae, there isn’t a literature of the fragment as its own form of literary expression worthy of study as any other. We have not yet come to a genre of the fragment. Maybe it is for lack of definition, or maybe we would rather refuse to acknowledge its presence, or its potential.

The fragment has existed traditionally either as the result of an author’s attempt—something begun, then never finished—or as a remnant, a consequence of an historic event and differs noticeably from other texts in its apparent degree of incompleteness. It does not offer its reader a conclusion, or closure which attempts to respond, in some way, to concerns introduced in a foregoing treatment.

The text remains incomplete; its author has set it aside never to finish it as Coleridge had with “Christabel,” saying he could not carry out the complete poem with the same success as the fragment, or the work is abandoned, as he had done with “Kubla Khan,” the poet suddenly called away to business—by his own account—and when he returned, it did not, and its author simply preceded it by passing away before its completion, as Pater had with his novel, Gaston de Latour. There is Mallarme′s 202 fragments of “A Tomb for Anatole,” the author claiming the poem could not be completed since it could not attain what he imagined it should.

In other cases, complete texts do not survive history and we are left with pieces of Sappho or Simonides, and the rest—with the possible exception of Pindar’s Victory Odes—lost or destroyed with the lyric poetry of ancient Greece.

The most conspicuous group must be the epics, if only for their volume. Since these have been around the longest, they have been subject to the greatest number of diachronic influences. Sometimes entire books, subsets of a classic text, were set aside as a culture developed, acquired different tastes, values, sentiments, and linguistic preferences. The Mahābhārata, the world’s longest epic, was continually revised over the course of twenty- four centuries. These exclusions—as a group—could be easily dismissed as the casualties of human history if it weren’t for the fact they had entertained and educated humanity, in some cultures, for hundreds of years before they were turned out, and replaced. If a portion of a text is removed, doesn’t it qualify as a fragment, as something that was originally a part of a larger whole? And if so, aren’t there enough of these in Persian, Greek, Chinese, Indian, and other cultures to constitute some kind of nominal or ‘memorial class’?

We do know—without speaking too much for authorial intentionality—that certain texts were created to be fragments. These might include Eliot’s The Waste Land, the great ‘fragment’ of the twentieth century, a popular attribution, although it might be more accurate to regard the poem along the lines of a patchwork with authorial incursion, various excerpts, allusions, seemingly random metaphors, and other literary devices, which together create a unified tone, not unlike the method used by renaissance poets who extracted segments from other works then inserted them into a poem which shared similar properties of theme or tone, a common practice, in the tradition of imitatio. So while The Waste Land may be considered by some as a ‘fragment,’ it is much more a gathering of ‘excerpts’ which appear as fragments, or fragmented, and share some common ground in order to advance the sensibilities of the author. The method of extracting fragments, then rearranging them with various incursions, was used also by Pound in his Cantos, which remained unfinished at the time of his death. The text itself appears fragmented, or fragmentary, as if suggesting the shattered state of modern consciousness, and independent from any larger claims for its cohesiveness.

It is doubtful if we should ever know if Wordsworth’s The Prelude was intentionally left incomplete, or if it was beyond ‘completion’. Interestingly, its subtitle, Growth of a Poet’s Mind refers to a metaphysical autobiography, unpublished at the time of the author’s death, more than a half century after it was begun. Like so many other works, it is an independent or free-standing fragment, not extracted from another source, or previously attached to a source which had become inaccessible. Perhaps these works were part of a larger unknown, as if the lives of their authors were connected to a greater thing which had not assumed, or could not assume, its form in language.

Keats, in his posthumous poem, “The Poet, A Fragment,” leaves undone a quest to know the poet, and not simply a portion of the thing he seeks: “Where’s the Poet? show him! show him,/ Muses nine! that I may know him!” ¹  Of course the request cannot be answered, or known, and “The Poet” remains a fragment. Thus the identity, ‘the poet’ of Wordsworth or Keats may survive mortality if the substance of ‘the poet’ remains attached to an undisclosed body greater than the self and in this way the mystery may continue, or ‘remain’. It is more than curious that Longfellow concludes “The Children’s Crusade, A Fragment,” with “Voices, echoes far and near . . . Formless, nameless, never ending.”  ² 

Other intentional fragments might include Pascal’s Pensées, the popular fragments of Keats and Shelley, (and other nineteenth-century romantics, enough it would seem to suggest a subclass of some kind,) and ‘Ossian’s’ The Fragments, that grand forgery of MacPherson’s carried onto the field by Napoleon, which influenced a romantic revival throughout Europe. Shelley’s “Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson” might fall into this class of the independent, or free-standing, fragment.

Whether the author was prevented from completing what was begun, or if it was a decision to leave the text in a partially completed state, these fragments were not derived from a parent work, or extracted from yet another literary piece, rather their maturation into a recognizable mode of discourse with a resolution was no longer pursued. These may range from a few words to lengthy sections or text subsets.

There are those fragments which have not been disclosed, either by accident or design such as The Dead Sea Scrolls, or those six chapters written by Pater and kept from any publication to date of Gaston de LaTour, (the fragment of a Fragment?) The day books and journals of poets and writers must be filled with these undisclosed or ‘hidden’ fragments.

Sometimes fragments just arrive belonging only to themselves, it seems, without any destination as though they are in some way noetic. (Since I’ve begun this essay, a line has visited me several times, and will not go away—Lyrical Palace full of night’s forgetfulness—and seems to have no place to call home, so I will put it down in my notebook, hoping it will find a family of similar orphans.)

An even broader view is taken by contemporary intertextualists: texts are themselves fragments open to interpretation and interplay with all other texts. This is one critical step away from the indeterminists who suggest meaning cannot be determined by the conventional standards, (either conveyed by the work, or through some context.) Although this may be too general for the purposes here—as it points to a linguistic cosmos of non-genre texts floating about with or without random contact, much like free radicals—it does widen the traditional notion, and encourages other suggestions on the worth and the place of the fragment.

It would be enough if these scattered pieces served by reminding us that we are the masters of unfinished business. Perhaps they could be—in some grand and impossible scheme—collected in The Book of Incomplete Forms, yet another reference for the species; a consolation for those who think all things must have a place of permanence, a location impervious to ruin, where life itself might not then appear so diffused, disassembled, lost, where we might forever search for the fragments of ourselves.

¹John Keats, “The Poet, A Fragment,” English Romantic Writers, ed. David Perkins (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1967) ll6l.

²Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Children’s Crusade, A Fragment,” The Poetical Works of Longfellow, (London: Oxford University Press, 1912) 775.