The Poetics of Fragmentation: Shared Modernity In
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THE POETICS OF FRAGMENTATION: SHARED MODERNITY IN PETRARCH, ELIOT, AND POUND A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Notre Dame in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Loren K. Higbee JoAnn DellaNeva, Director Ph.D. in Literature Program Notre Dame, Indiana December 2013 THE POETICS OF FRAGMENTATION: SHARED MODERNITY IN PETRARCH, ELIOT, AND POUND Abstract by Loren K. Higbee Petrarch, a poet who pioneered a lyric subjectivity that would heavily influence subsequent European literature and a scholar who sought to bridge the gap between the ancients and his own generation, has often been called the “first modern man.” In the early 20th century, a group of American and British poets including T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound began writing what would later be called “Modernist” literature. What serves to link these poets, so distant in time, place, and aesthetics? I argue that a central aspect of their shared modernity lies in a poetics of fragmentation. Relying on close readings of their works, principally the lyric poems of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta or Canzoniere, Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land, and Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and the Cantos, I describe and analyze a fascination with the literary fragment, which includes their heavy reliance on allusion, their emphasis on repetition and the passage of time, their fascination with personae and masks, and their frequent images of internal rupture and dissolution. CONTENTS Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: Tradition, Composition, Quotation ....................................................................8 1.1 Petrarchan Classicism ........................................................................................9 1.2 Petrarch and Dante ...........................................................................................19 Chapter 2: The Petrarchan Poetic Fragment ......................................................................30 2.1 The Canzoniere as Collection ..........................................................................30 2.2 Collection and Recollection .............................................................................33 2.3 Scattering and Gathering..................................................................................38 2.4 Repetition and Divisions of Time ....................................................................45 Chapter 3: “Sparsa anime fragmenta” – Personal Fragmentation in Petrarch ...................53 3.1 Dismembering ..................................................................................................53 3.2 Separation of Body and Soul ...........................................................................56 3.3 Internal Conflicts .............................................................................................61 3.4 Personae ...........................................................................................................66 3.5 Conversion and Reintegration..........................................................................10 Chapter 4: Fragmented Modernism ...................................................................................74 4.1 Ruin, Fetish, and Sensation: The Fragment from Romanticism to Symbolism .............................................................................................74 4.2 Pound, Eliot, and Early Anglo-American Modernism .....................................83 4.3 Allusion and the Uses of Tradition ..................................................................88 4.4 Collections of/in Fragments .............................................................................99 Chapter 5: The Modernist Poetic Fragment .....................................................................106 5.1 Memory, Collection, and Re-collection .........................................................106 5.2 Divisions of Time and Repetition ..................................................................113 5.3 Lists and a Heap of Broken Images ...............................................................126 Chapter 6: The Divided Self ............................................................................................140 6.1 Communication, Solitude, and Exile .............................................................141 6.2 Internal Divisions ...........................................................................................157 6.3 Personae and Labile Identity ..........................................................................171 Chapter 7: The Poetics of Fragmentation ........................................................................180 7.1 Petrarchan Modernity and Early Modernism .................................................180 7.2 Disruption, Trauma, and Fragmentation ........................................................192 7.3 The Canzoniere, “Prufrock,” and The Waste Land .......................................199 ii Works Cited .....................................................................................................................217 iii INTRODUCTION In one of the cardinal stories of Egyptian mythology, the god Osiris is tricked by his jealous brother Set, who seals him in a coffin and throws him into the Nile. Isis, Osiris’ twin sister and wife, sets out in search of her husband’s body, worried that without the proper burial ceremonies her consort’s spirit will not be able to find peace. Set, however, finds the sarcophagus while out hunting and cuts his brother’s body into fourteen pieces, which he scatters throughout Egypt. After a long search, Isis dutifully recovers thirteen of the pieces, but unfortunately Osiris’ phallus has been consumed by a fish. Undeterred, she fashions a new one from gold, attaches it to the other thirteen fragments, and by means of a spell restores her husband to life. Osiris, fragmented and re- membered, living and dead, takes his place in the Egyptian pantheon as the god of renewal, the underworld, and the afterlife. From the earliest written works to the post-modern fascination with mosaic and bricolage, the concept of fragmentation has played a vital role in literature. In Hindu mythology, the gods divide and reunite their own immortal essence through multiple incarnations as avatars, and the dissolution and division of self is not limited to the divine; as the Katha Upanishad advises: When all the knots of The heart are broken, Mortal becomes immortal: This is the teaching. (VI.15) 1 In the New Testament, Jesus blesses and distributes a few loaves and fishes which are miraculously augmented, and even after the multitude is fed, baskets of leftover pieces are gathered up. Just before his death, he institutes the sacrament of the Eucharist, the central Christian rite, by breaking bread and then referring to the resultant fragments as his body. Shakespeare’s Coriolanus cries, “Go, get you home, you fragments!” (I.i.230), while Macbeth wants a doctor who can “[p]luck from the memory a rooted sorrow, / Raze out the written troubles of the brain” (V.iii.41-2). Wordsworth considered “some fragment from his dream of human life” (“Ode: Intimations of Immortality” 92); Byron broke the idols in the temple of Baal; Shelley addressed the shattered remains of the statue of a once-great king. Stevens found thirteen different ways to look at a blackbird, while D.H. Lawrence noted how the body dies piecemeal, and e. e. cummings fractured and reformed language itself. This dissertation serves as a specific sort of literary biography of the poetics of fragmentation, examining how and why the fragment has been used in European lyric poetry. The images of scattering and gathering, of re-membering and remembering, of the fragment and the ruin, appear in the poetry of numerous eras and language traditions, but in a few authors these themes and approaches take a prominent place. Consequently, I have posited a poetics of fragmentation that forms a crucial link between the poetry of two very disparate times and places, Early Modern Italy and early Modernist England, between Petrarch, often referred as the father of humanism and the first “modern” man, and Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, two of the most prominent exemplars of early Modernist poetry. 2 While the differences between the poets are significant, there are several reasons why I have chosen them. First, the concept of fragmentation doesn’t just show up in the poetry of those movements but is central to them; it informs and even shapes them. Second, the ways in which fragmentation is used show a certain continuity as well as significant differences, which lends itself to an interesting and valuable comparative approach. In doing this, I do not mean to suggest either that Eliot and Pound are the only important Modernist poets nor even that the poetry of these two men (and their approaches to it) are monolithic. There are, however, significant similarities that tie the two men together and make them a useful duo for this study. Naturally, references to them as “the Modernists” does not mean to imply that they were the only important Modernist poets; rather, I use it at times as a useful shorthand expression. The first three chapters of this dissertation focus on the poetics of fragmentation in Petrarch. While I consider his entire oeuvre—the Trionfi, personal correspondence, even his