My presentation from the 2008 Practical Criticism Midwest Conference. I explore the nature of the Romantic Fragment and its correlation to Romantic Rhetoric.
This is his observation of poetry and process as well as his observation of humanity: for, “from an inexplicable defect of harmony in the constitution of human nature, the pain of the inferior is frequently connected with the pleasures of the superior portions of our being… tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain” (Shelley 711). The pain of his failures can provide just as much inspiration as the joy from all of his successes. <number>