Fragmentary Domesticity: Wordsworth's Image of the Common

This essay takes up an impasse in articulating the relation of parts and wholes in discussions around the term "Anthropocene" as an entry point into understanding the complexities and afterlives of Wordsworth's poetics of the common (and vice versa), where "common" encompasses both what is ordinary and what is shared. Probing the conceptual registers of the figure of catachresis, the affordances of the poetic fragment, and the intricate and intimate social folds of domesticity, I read the important but oft-neglected fragment "Home at Grasmere" to uncover an ecologically attuned notion of everyday relationality without wholeness, what I refer to as "groundless community." In attending to both the mechanics and the philosophical power of Wordsworth's poetic thinking, I also gesture toward a larger Romantic current of thinking community and the common that has crucially shaped the development of twentieth-century and contemporary theory.