Question

What is fragmentation in poetry?

Answer 1

Hint: The phase or situation of splitting and being broken into pieces is known as fragmentation. Fragments meant pieces of a whole. Readers of poetry by the nineteenth century had become attached to certain compositions that were not written completely, then they incorporated it into poems. In poetry also we can assume that the usage of fragmentation would be similar to the literal meaning of fragmentation.

Complete answer:
Each fragment is a section of a bigger context, so here a poem that is designed to seem broken or unfinished which makes them fragmentary. So it is a piece that has been broken off, something that has been removed or separated from everything else, something that is flawed. Most of the ancients' work has been passed down to everyone in scraps, shambles, and broken pieces.

Fragments were mostly allegorical in the medieval and Renaissance periods, implying something snatched from a sacred whole. They were relics from a bygone age. By the early nineteenth century, readers of poetry had become inclined to read incomplete works, and then it became acceptable, if not trendy, to compose poems that were deliberately in parts.

A fragment was revolutionized by modernist poetry writers as a self-aware style of writing which interrupts the passage of time, leaving holes and falls ambiguities. They produced fragmentary epics by combining disparate texts, mosaics and collages. As all writings are incomplete and all poetic vocabulary is inadequate, the postmodern style of the fragment relishes in its own inconsistencies, partiality.

The following is an example of fragmentation in a poem;
“I was in love - and you, in love
With me… Was that truly
A better time, or does nostalgia
Make it appear that way?
- play it again, why don't you?”

Here we see that every line is quite incomplete but gets completed in the following line. There are many pauses to be noticed, such a poem is said to be fragmented.

Note: Another glossary of poetic terms is ‘dissonance’. The Latin meaning for this is "tone difference." The void of harmony or understanding between items would be referred to as dissonance. Dissonance is a distortion in the style of harmony of sounds or tempo of a stanza in poetry. It is indeed an intentional uneasiness used to create a distracting impact in the script.