Defective Verse

I wonder to what extent the 19th-century philological treatment of the texts that would be used to build up national literary canons, together with the difficulty of dealing with damaged, destroyed, and partially absent sources, might have played a role in the rise in the 20th century of free verse, imagism, and other schools that strongly rejected the formal apparatus that had always been thought to be an ineliminable feature of poetics.

Reading Egil's Saga, composed in Iceland around 1240 CE, I am finding that the verses that capture my imagination most are the ones marked with the marginal note: defective. Take this one for example:

*

And...

...the pillar,

glorifier

of my deeds,

which...

...

...the scourge

of Halfdan's line.

*

Or here is one that begins to express a sentiment whose outcome is then lost to time:

*

I often feel

when the ruler of wealth...

....

*

The complete verses are beautiful too, untranslatable, and thus endowed with an extra layer of strangeness when translated. But it is defectiveness, or the points at which philology fails, that seems to yield, unintentionally, a distinctly modern aesthetic effect. I'm sure someone, probably French, has written about the aesthetics of defectiveness; here I just wanted to mention that I've noticed it in some of the fragmentary parts of the Icelandic Sagas.

Comments

[Stephen Menn]

Both Pound and H.D. wrote poems inspired by fragments esp. of Sappho. Pound's poem "Papyrus," extracted from a fragmentarily preserved Sappho poem, reads in toto "Spring .../ Too long .../Gongula ...".

[David Doern]

The Japanese have the idea of wabi-sabi which, I think, relates to the aesthetics of defectiveness. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi