The individual experience

For instance, it was a Romantic idea to understand the self as more or less separate from the social world, and this idea sits at the heart of a literary form—the fragment—that so often focuses on individual experience. 

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Isaiah Berlin characterizes these Romantic apprehensions and preoccupations as

            a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of consciousness, a longing for the unbounded and the indefinable, for perpetual movement and change, an effort to return to the forgotten sources of life, a passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective, a search after means of expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals.

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Prose poems, like the Romantic fragment, frequently make the implicit claim that understanding is often arrived at through the exclusion of information. The reader is asked to complete the work through an active process of reading, enabling them to add their own supplement to the text they encounter.

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Prose poems are, on the face of it, well suited to postmodernism’s assumptions that multiple views and texts have replaced totalizing visions, and that difference and diversity are hallmarks of a healthy, questioning art that addresses both future and past. 

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Daily experience

Accessibility (Wordsworth)

Jeffrey C. Robinson notes that Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” (1800) “argues for the near identity of poetry and prose [in] driving to recover and stimulate through poetry an essential human spirit available to all persons.

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Intermingling of forms (Schlegel)

“Romantic poetry is a progressive, universal poetry. Its aim isn’t merely to reunite all the separate species of poetry and put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric. It tries to and should mix and fuse poetry and prose, inspiration and criticism, the poetry of art and the poetry of nature, and make poetry lively and sociable, and life and society poetical… Other kinds of poetry are finished and are now capable of being fully analyzed. The romantic kind of poetry is still in a state of becoming: that, in fact, is its real essence: that it should forever be becoming and never be perfected. 

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Nostalgia and the elevation of ancient forms

…much of Romanticism is informed by the idea that we live in the aftermath of genius, some of which approaches the divine, and that writing, and making art more generally, is a way of recollecting—partially and unsatisfactorily—what we cannot possess. Sophie Thomas makes the connection between the “ruin” and the “fragment”:

Essentially, ruins are highly evocative forms of the fragment, and they operate according to its logic: they suggest an absent whole, and indeed occupy an ambivalent space between the part and the past whole, whose presence they affirm and negate (affirm, paradoxically, by negation)… 

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[Anne Carson and Teju Cole]

            The Romantic fragment, in recognizing the incomplete and broken nature of the world, was created out of idealism and nostalgia. It was partly driven by a regret that things were no longer as they once were—that the heroic age had irretrievably passed—and there is something almost excruciating about this aspect of Romanticism.

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Translation and “Translation”

James Macpherson’s Ossian (1761 and 1763) was “the first significant signal in English that strict boundaries between poetry and prose were breaking down.”

Prompt: Write a bio of a fictional poet or a brief survey of a fictional culture, and write a prose poem that is a product of that fiction. This can be nostalgic, contemporary, otherworldly—whatever you want to do. (20 minutes)