Romantic Fragments

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The literary fragment is one of the most characteristic phenomena of the Romantic movement. Among the many Romantic poems published as "fragments," some of the most renowned are Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," Keats' "Hyperion," and Byron's "The Giaour."

The literary theorists of the Jena School held up fragments as a model for a new kind of poetic originality. While a fragment is obviously suggestive of a larger whole, Schlegel proposed that a poetic fragment must also be "complete in itself," comparing it to a hedgehog whose prickly exterior keeps it "isolated from the surrounding world." Thus conceived, fragments are distinctively elliptical. They stimulate the play of imaginative possibilities and provoke a "chaotic universality" of poetic insight. A literary fragment, like a relic from an ancient ruin, is a mental passport to a lost civilization.

"Fragments from a Writing Desk" is Melville's first piece of fiction, his earliest surviving prose, written when he was 20 and published in two installments in 1839. Scholars have noted the "close correspondence in content between" it and The Arabian Nights, including the "Eastern splendor" of its setting and reverberations with certain tales.

"Under the Rose" is presented to the reader as a curious "extract" from an old manuscript entitled "Travels in Persia (Iran) by a servant of My Lord the Ambassador." In it we meet a polyglot infidel, "expert in divers tongues of both continents, and learned in the chirography of the Persian and Arabic." The character "Lugar-Lips" (likely a misprint of "Sugar-Lips") is a Persian poet in the tradition of "Coral Lips" (from The Arabian Nights) and "Rubylips" (from Disraeli's Tancred).

For this Meetup, we will read some of Herman Melville's "fragment" writings and some fragments of Herman Melville's writing, as follows: