One of Friedrich Schlegel’s fragments defines the genre: “A Fragment must as a miniature work of art be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and perfect in itself, like a hedgehog.” Coleridge’s “ Kubla Khan: or a Vision in a Dream. The passion for ruins as well as the taste for poetic relics and antiquities contributed to the acceptance of the romantic fragment, which we now recognize as a genre in its own right and a prototype of romantic poetry in general. Readers had become so accustomed to reading unfinished texts by the early nineteenth century that it became acceptable and even fashionable to publish poems that were intentionally fragmentary. In the medieval and Renaissance eras, fragments were often allegorical, suggesting something broken off from a divine whole. Even though we know that Greek lyric is mere fragments, indeed, because we know that Greek lyric is mere fragments, we act, speak, and write as if the unthinkable had not happened, as if pious bishops, careless monks, and hungry mice had not consigned Sappho and her lyrical colleagues to irremediable oblivion. No experience in reading, perhaps, is more depressing and more frustrating than to open a volume of Sappho’s fragments and to recognize, yet again-one always hopes that somehow this time it will be different-that this poetry is all but lost to us. . . . Johnson puts it in The Idea of Lyric (1982): Much of the work of the ancients comes down to us in fragments and tatters, cut pieces. The following definition of the term fragment is reprinted from A Poet's Glossary by Edward Hirsch.Ī part broken off, something cut or detached from the whole, something imperfect. A fragment is a part of a larger work or a poem made to appear discontinuous or incomplete.

What means also a sentence fragment