Reading as Flight: Fragment Poems from Shelley’s Notebooks

Theories of the Romantic fragment poem have tended to propose constitutive reading by the projection of an absent whole. The fragment, whether overtly presented as such or identified editorially, is instinctively interpreted as a deviation from a standard norm of wholeness or completion. In common with several other major Romantic poets, P. B. Shelley is known for some critical/theoretical arguments which seem to propose incompleteness as an intrinsic quality of literature and art. Thomas McFarland’s Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin is a collection of chapters on Wordsworth and Coleridge arranged around the idea of fragmentary form; this is prefaced by a long historical survey that demonstrates the pervasive fragmentariness of Romantic culture. Carlene Adamson’s facsimile of Shelley’s ‘Pisan Winter Notebook’ of 1820 to 1821 contains a cluster of short texts addressing a common strong visual image, the eagle in flight.