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Love-songs and scatter'd rhymes Unfinish'd sentences, or half erased, And rhapsodies like this, were sometimes found – (Charlotte Smith, “Beachy Head”) The phrase “Romantic fragment” calls up two quite different sets of associations. On the one hand, we tend to think of poems (and sometimes other texts) that seem unfinished, often called fragments, written between, say, 1790 and 1830. On the other hand, it is almost impossible not to think of the cult of ruins and of fragmentary relics of earlier times that has been part of European thought since the Renaissance and was assimilated into British thought as inherently “Romantic” in the eighteenth century. In his “Preface to Adonais” (1821), Shelley juxtaposes the two contrasting ideas: I consider the fragment of Hyperion, as second to nothing that was ever produced by a writer of the same years. John Keats died at Rome of a consumption, in his twenty-fourth year, on the – of – 1821, and was buried in the romantic and lonely cemetery of the protestants in that city, under the pyramid that is the tomb of Cestius, and the massy walls and towers, now mouldering and desolate, which formed the circuit of ancient Rome. The cemetery is an open space among the ruins covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place. ( Shelley 1967 : 73) Shelley begins with ... log in or subscribe to read full text