Interested in the question of unity / fragmentation, which Roger's
parsed in a couple of directions so far.
Any poem is a consistent presentation, I think, no matter how
heterogeneous the matter presented therein. All sorts of things within
it may be presented as broken, from the pentameter to the most basic
conventions of syntax, but the presentation is of these various broken
things *as one* - as "a" poem. This is so even when the poem is
presented as a sort of break or caesura in a more general flux, a
holding pattern for whatever happened to be whizzing about at some
particular moment.
Inasmuch as a poem is a literary object, however, its domain is that of
figurative meaning: tropes, substitutions, shifts in sense. That's where
things get interesting, because the system of difference/reference it
sets up begins before the poem does and continues after it leaves off.
Here the distinction between whole and fragment is largely irrelevant,
because it's an open and untotalizable system that reaches out into the
diachronic/dialogic realm, a social and temporal artifact. The system of
tropes also has its own specific pathologies (circular reference,
tangled hierarchies), which inevitably derail attempts to fix its
meaning through critical "reading". Any attempt to apprehend the poem as
a "whole" on the level of meaning will end up with something broken
(perhaps subtly broken).
Dominic
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