Romanticism and the Prose Poem

· The fragment

· The individual experience

· Daily experience

· Accessibility (Wordsworth)

· Intermingling of forms (Schlegel)

· Nostalgia and the elevation of ancient forms

· Translation and “Translation”

The fragment

Romanticism inaugurated the idea that fragmentary philosophical and literary works may have a special virtue because of their fragmentariness and, what is more, the fragment may be understood, somewhat paradoxically, as complete or finished.

In his brief preface to Paris Spleen, Baudelaire explicitly celebrates such fragmentariness, asserting his fragments do not need to be part of any greater and unifying narrative: “I will not hold [the reader] to the unbroken thread of some superfluous plot… Chop it into many fragments and you will see how each is able to exist apart.”

Baudelaire declares that prose may be written without the conventional superstructures of plot and traditional narrative and may align itself to the incomplete and the disconnected.

In effect, many writers had lost faith with the established literary order, just as many had lost faith with the established political, social, and ideological orders. This loss of faith was complicated by what Andrew M. Stauffer suggests was the Romantics’ emphasis on “emotional affect and transmission: sensibility and the sublime” at a time when they were “newly pressurized by the discourse of the Revolution and the Terror,” following the American Revolution (1765-83), the French Revolution (1789), and the European revolutions of 1848. He claims this resulted in a dilemma or series of paradoxes that included being “filled with fury, yet pleasingly terrified.”

D.F. Rauber observes:

The great formal problem of the romantic poet can be stated briefly as the devising of means to embody the infinite in a finite, discrete, and sequential medium… the fragment constitutes a perfect formal solution to the problem… it matches romantic ideals and tone as fully and completely as the closed couplet matches the ideals of eighteenth-century neoclassicism.