Philosophy, like politics or ecology, is a constant presence in the poems of Lyrical Ballads. As Wordsworth and Coleridge openly state in the ‘Advertisement’, some of the poems are written in direct reaction to their contemporaries’ engagement with philosophical thought: ‘the lines entitled Expostulation and Reply, and those which follow, arose out of conversation with a friend who was somewhat unreasonably attached to modern books of moral philosophy’ (LB 4). Other poems that position themselves in direct reference to questions of epistemology, ontology or the status of truth are ‘We Are Seven’ or ‘Anecdote for Fathers, Shewing how the practice of Lying may be taught,’ to mention two of the most obvious examples. In both cases the question revolves around what Andrew Bennett has termed the ‘poetics of ignorance’ of the collection.1 Throughout, Lyrical Ballads has some form of conceptual ambition. Yet that ambition is not clear at all, and that is where the story (or, for others, the trouble) of poetry and philosophy begins in the text.

In the first chapter of this book I tried to show how an image of fragmentation such as the ‘fragment of a wooden bowl’ in The Ruined Cottage can play a metonymic role in signifying a larger concern with fragmentation in Wordsworth's poetry. The present chapter wants to illustrate how fracture weaves itself into Wordsworth's texts syntactically, namely, by way of a rhetorical and grammatical figure. The analysis will concentrate on the figure of parenthesis. To ensure a clear focus, I will limit the reading of this figure – at once rhetorical and grammatical – to some specific moments in The Prelude.

Parenthesis is both a punctuation mark and a rhetorical figure. The syntactical break in a textual structure by means of a parenthetical sign is fundamentally disruptive in its effects. Grammatical treatises of the eighteenth century, which often include a section or chapter on parenthesis, are as insistent on this as today's reference works. Parenthesis, both as a grammatical unit and as a rhetorical move, produces a hiatus and a fracture in thought and language.

Ralph Waldo Emerson considered the status and problem of citation as both fundamental and deeply troubling. In his essay ‘Quotation and Originality’ (1876), he writes: ‘We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs by imitation. […] The originals are not original.’ Knowing of our inability to produce outside the chain of quotations, however, still does not lead us to renounce ownership of our creations. As Emerson recounts in the same essay: ‘Wordsworth, as soon as he heard a good thing, caught it up, meditated upon it, and very soon reproduced it in his conversation and writing. If De Quincey said, “That is what I told you,” he replied, “No: that is mine, – mine, and not yours”.’

Emerson's conceptualisation of the power of citation and its metaphorical force through the figure of originals and precursors sounds almost like a prefiguration of a Bloomian anxiety of influence, or even a post-modern insistence on pastiche. Rather than reading this curious Emersonian fantasy in these psychoanalytical or intertextual terms, however, this chapter wants to suggest that its less obvious reverse – De Quincey's archiving of whatever Wordsworth claims for himself – is more revealing. It sheds light on how the rhetoric and language of criticism have to deal with the tensions that are produced through the practice of citation.

COHERENT FRACTURES

This final chapter wants to take the reader into our Romantic present. It will do so by discussing the purchase fracture and fragmentation have as critical notions in contemporary theorisations of Romanticism. A small selection of texts by Paul de Man will be my main focus. His writings provide an important case for illustrating how fracture and fragmentation function both as critical and as heuristic categories in and for Romantic Studies. In this sense, the chapter is another case study, albeit focusing on texts that are historically situated in the late twentieth century. To argue that this approach is fruitful as well as methodologically sound already reveals part of the assumptions and conclusions that are at stake here. The introduction indicated why there are good reasons to understand de Man and other figures as forming, in significant ways, part of the historical projection termed ‘Romanticism’. This not only relates to de Man as one of the most influential figures in the construction and theorisation of this very category. More importantly, it is to understand him as a figure of Romanticism. This is not a matter of simply equating de Man's writings with their Romantic subjects. Rather, it is a question of aligning them in a meaningful trajectory. An insight into certain parallels and affinities (only sometimes elective) between them improves an understanding of how they function as historical and conceptual categories.

FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE AND ANTHROPOMORPHISM

Jean-Jacques Rousseau begins the second chapter of his Essai sur l'origine des langues (1753) with a meditation on the invention of speech. He maintains that we often misconstrue the fundamental character of the origin of language by mistaking the primacy of passionate poetry for a more rational geometry: ‘The language of the first men is put before us as though it were the languages of Geometers, while we see that they were the languages of Poets. This must have been so. We did not begin by reasoning but by feeling.’ This assertion about the pre-eminence of the poetic is part of a longer story about the broken origins of language and Romanticism. This chapter is, in part, about that story. It shifts our attention from linguistic-architectonic fragmentation (the Babelian tower) to a tropological linguistic fracture, namely anthropomorphism. This provides us with a different case study of how fracture is a particularly powerful notion through which to grasp Romanticism. Within the context of this larger framework, the chapter begins by asking how and why the origin of language and poetry are so often identified with one another. The figural and conceptual strategies employed by Romantic poets, rhetoricians, and philosophers who advocate this conjunction reveal that the fracturing trope of anthropomorphism occupies a special place in the field of linguistic theory and historiography. Anthropomorphism emerges not ‘just’ as a rhetorical figure, but as a linguistic move with deep philosophical implications.

LETTERS AS LITERATURE

This chapter is on John Keats and fragmentation. Its main body and argument will show that the rhetoric of Keats's letters reveals how his epistolary poetics relies on an economy of fracture and reciprocal movement. I will attempt to explain how this dynamic of exchange parallels the condition of a linguistic predicament of brokenness. Finally, the analysis will illustrate how the letter in Keats's work becomes a fragmentary principle around which his posthumous corpus is constructed. Keats's grave, containing an unopened letter addressed to him, and marked by a broken lyre, offers a powerful image for the way his corpus relies on fragmentariness. Fragmentation becomes the point around which his archival body, dominated by the rhetoric of brokenness, is assembled and understood. The discussion thus locates a fracture at the point of supposed origin. As its title indicates, the chapter will focus mostly on Keats's letters and their reception. While this is not a canonical straitjacket, I have mostly omitted references to, and discussions of, his poetry. This is a directed and critically deliberate decision. As will transpire, I believe that the formal status of the letter is especially powerful in illustrating the link between fragmentation and Romanticism.

THE PROGRESSIVIST NARRATIVE

In the opening book of his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811–32), Goethe records one of his most important childhood experiences by taking a distancing look at himself in the third person:

Just as this date shakes and severs Goethe's biography, the tremendous impact of the earthquake of Lisbon is a defining moment for the entire century. In what follows, I want to take seriously Goethe's image of the disruptive power of this well-known disaster. The argument of this third chapter presents the Lisbon earthquake as an event whose metaphorical force provides a conceptual springboard for a reading of some central texts on the sublime. Although my point of departure is the material circumstance of 1755, its role in these readings is primarily that of conceptual and rhetorical catalyst.

The earthquake of Lisbon has captured the imagination of people throughout the centuries in many ways. In recent times we have become familiar with the journalistic strategy of linking disastrous events such as 9/11 or the Asian tsunami in 2004 with the eighteenth-century disaster.

How do we fill gaps? Why do we want to fill them? What is the nature of fracture and fragmentation, in contrast to wholeness and plenitude, and our fascination with them? How can we get a grasp on our intrigue with the conceptual, historical, and material fissures that we use to account for ourselves? Emily Dickinson's concentrated lines, written in 1863, broach these questions of fracture and fragmentation effectively. Her poem thematises how an anxious desire to fill a ‘Gap’ only leads to replacing the fracture with its origin, which is ‘the Thing that caused it’. Any attempt to ‘Block it up’ with another substance results in the gap ‘yawn[ing] the more’. But whatever caused the fracture to begin with must repeat this break. To ‘insert’ the cause of a ‘Gap’ is endlessly to reproduce the fracture. The impossibility of ‘filling’ this gap either with itself or with emptiness – with ‘air’ – leaves the fracture unrepaired at the centre of the poem. The ‘Gap’ turns into an ‘Abyss’ that cannot be soldered, marked by the parenthesis and incompleted punctuation in the poem. The origin of our means to solder turns out to be broken.

NATURE'S MOURNING AND WORDSWORTH'S THE RUINED COTTAGE

The story of the Tower of Babel is one of the most poignant and powerful images for the fragmentation of language. It is a condensed trope of an ideal Language of plenitude and understanding being broken, scattering with its fragmentation peoples, their communication with each other, and their position as subjects in the natural world. This first chapter will use the image of Babel to explore several different dimensions of linguistic fracture and scattering, and think about how they are negotiated in the poetry of William Wordsworth. It proposes to understand Babel as a trope or conceptual springboard that goes further than the first narratorial layer of the biblical story.