alternation of points of view, it also means that no moment stands on its
own account: ‘no idea is isolated, but is what it is only in combination
with all other ideas’ explained Schlegel, ‘all the classical poems of the
ancients are coherent, inseparable; they form an organic whole, they
constitute, properly viewed, only a single poem, the only one in which
poetry itself appears in its perfection...aneternally developing book’.^135
Or, as Eliot put it, ‘no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning
alone’; his complete meaning is to be found in his relation to the ‘organic
whole’ of the Tradition, which is eternally developing since it is always
open to revision by the really new work of art.^136 And for Schlegel, the
only appropriate literary form for this expression of perpetual interlinking
irony was the fragment or fragments. Only a ‘motley heap of sudden
ideas’ (or whatThe Waste Landcalls its ‘heap of broken images’) rather
than a centrally organised poem could manifest such freedom, since the
fragment’s incompletion would testify to its resistance to all external
genres, unities, totals and wholes that would encompass it, while simul-
taneously making infinite freedom potentially visible in its ironic, demo-
cratic relation to all the other fragments in ‘anendlesssuccession of
mirrors’.^137 In other words, because all limited perspectives are tran-
scended by irony, the fragments would resist any individual completion
for the promise of an infinitely diverse relation of irony; but that which is
infinite is that which has nothing outside it and which nothing could
complete, and therefore this ironic in-finitude becomes another sort of
unconditioned absolute. Despite their admiration for each other, among
commentators on Schlegel’s theory there is a division between those who
see the fragmented form actually encompassing this infinite absoluteness
(Benjamin, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy) and those who stress that since
irony is endless it thus never attains the synthesis of an absolute (Blanchot,
de Man, Gasche ́).^138 This division roughly follows their respective revi-
sions of Romanticism itself as a movement which eliminates discontinuity
or promotes it; nevertheless, Eliot’s insistence that the Tradition is a
simultaneouspresent puts his version of modernism closer to the realisa-
tion of this absolute, a plural version of the singular Bergsonian absolute
he had rejected in the Imagist poem.^139 If the famousAthenaeum Fragment
206 – ‘a fragment, like a miniature work of art, has to be entirely isolated
from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a porcupine’ –
sounds like a description of the ideal Imagist poem, then such self-
completion would be truly realised by the Tradition.^140 For where the
meaning of a poet’s experience is only in its relation to the Tradition, this
meaning would be both ‘extended and completed’ (Eliot’s words) and
Inside and outside modernism 57