Thinking and Writing with Leaves: Poplar Sympoetics in Romanticism

ABSTRACT

This article explores how Romantic literatures imagine the lives of and reconfigure encounters with poplar trees. It pays particular attention to German-language writing, its arboreal contexts, and the aesthetic modes of talking and listening to poplars. The Romantics, I argue, were interested in poplars not (only) because they were aesthetically pleasing objects, but because poplars evidently made themselves known as self-expressive subjects of a life – a life that the poplars themselves, in turn, imposed upon Romantic poetics. The article reads Romantic poplars as deeply entrenched in the material semiotics of human-tree histories, co-habitation, and the various forms of mourning and remembering with poplars in the Romantic period. Approaching Romantic writing with poplars as a form of sympoetics that is closely connected to poplars outside of the texts, the article analyzes selected poplar writings transcending realms of the symbolic and translating the nonverbal soundscapes of poplar articulations into written texts.

KEYWORDS:

• biosemiotics
• Romanticism
• arboreal poetics
• poplar poetics
• cultural plant studies

Acknowledgment

I am very grateful to the editors of this issue and to the anonymous reviewers for constructive feedback and thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. All translations from the German (including the titles of the works discussed in this article) are my own, unless indicated otherwise.

2. Compare, for example, Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes’ A la villa Farnèse: les deux peupliers (c. 1782–84) or Caspar David Friedrich’s Frau am Fenster (c. 1822), or – a bit later – Claude Monet’s poplar series (c. 1891).

3. Seiji Hattori sees Hölderlin’s poem as an indication of the fact that the ancient myth of Hades planting a memorial silver poplar tree in Elysium on the death of the nymph Leuce has “already become an autonomous symbol of death” (Hattori 2012, 315).

4. Arnd Bohm, however, finds 18^th-and 19^th-century poplars “relatively slighted” and thus considers it “all the more poignant that two poets, Cowper and Hopkins, should make poplars the focus of their attention” (Bohm 2003, 46).

5. For an innovative approach to rethinking “romanticising” as a means of “conceding actor-status [Akteur-Status] to trees” see Nitzke (2020, 190).

6. The easy and unaided proliferation of poplars was one of the reasons botanists and economists alike were eager to further the planting of poplars in German territories, not least because of the “ever growing lack of wood” in commercialized and increasingly industrialized human-wood cultures (cf e.g. Leonhardi 1798, 4).

7. Cf. the report of a visitor to Carlsruhe mentioning “the poplar alley you travel several hours to reach Carlsruhe” (“Korrespondenz-Nachrichten” 1834, 1044).

8. “Leaves” [Blätter] in German can designate leaves of plants, sheets of paper, and collections of texts (“files”). See also the lemma “Blatt” the etymology of which was brought into context with “folium” in Wilhelm und Jacob Grimm’s German Dictionary (Grimm and Grimm 1860, 72–73).

9. Posts where tolls had to be delivered used a “movable tree for obstructing roads, gates etc. for horses and wagons” (Adelung [1798] 2021, 1492). Just like the “Schlagbaum”, the “Grenzbaum” [“border tree”] reflects the material-semiotic ways in which trees were literally and figuratively used as stand-ins for political and territorial ends.

10. Michael Marder calls attention to the fact that human (projected) interpretations of vegetal soundscapes is not anthropocentric by default: “To distil meaningful signs from the sounds that leaves, branches, and currents of air emit in concert is not to force a human semantic form onto the language of plants, but to attend to them in the places of their growth. It is also to acknowledge the untranslatable and the indiscernible, what cannot be picked up by the human ear and what exceeds our very interpretative venture, oriented toward the communication (if not communion) of plants and the elements” (Marder 2017, 115).

11. The origin of the Latin “populus” (folk, people) for naming poplars was – in the German context – denounced as being unclear (Künitz 1807, 380), yet the connection between “Die Pappel”, “lat. populus, engl. poplar, fr. peuplier, poln. Poppla” (Kaltschmidt 1839, 605) was evident.

12. The books have pointedly been described as “partly invented source editions [teilfingierte Quelleneditionen]” (Bunzel Bunzel 2010, 19).

13. See in this respect Haraway’s idea of making kin not kind: “Kin making is making persons, not necessarily as individuals or as humans” (Haraway 2016, 103).

14. As far as I am aware, Bettina von Arnim’s innovative syncretistical natural religion informed by (Günderrodian) panentheism has not yet been sufficiently explored (cf. Becker-Cantarino 2020, 364) and is most often only linked to Storm-and-Stress “Naturpoesie”, Goethe’s pantheism, mesmerism, and Schleiermacher’ spiritual theories (cf. the comments on “Romantische Naturwissenschaft und Naturphilosophie” in Arnim 1986, 910–931; for a proto-ecological reading of Arnim see Janson 2018).

15. On the concept of “Natursprache” in German Romanticism see Goodbody (1984). Kate Rigby has furthered our understanding of how German Romantics explored more-than-human soundscapes to undermine idealist theories of consciousness and subjectivity and instead probe the affects and effects pertaining to sound in what Rigby denotes as “atmospheric ecopoetics” (Rigby 2012).

16. See also the second letter from the “poplar correspondence” addressing the “beloved tree” and closing with the appeal: “May nothing offensive happen to you, oh tree!” (Arnim 1986, 583).

17. Scholarship has often underestimated Bettina von Arnim’s prose as “rhetorics of naivete” – repeating Bettine’s own dictum of her poplar writing as “childish and incompetent” (Arnim 1986, 583) – and thus failed to recognize the variety of voices in and the creative, self-reflecting ventures of her work (cf. Becker-Cantarino 2020, 356–358).

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Frederike Middelhoff

Frederike Middelhoff is assistant professor of German Literature and Romanticism Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt (GER). She studied German and British Literature in Würzburg (GER) and Exeter in the UK and completed her PhD at the University of Würzburg in 2019. Her first book investigated the interconnections between the genre of animal autobiography, zoology, and bourgeois culture in German-speaking countries from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. She has published various articles in the field of Cultural Animal Studies, Plants Studies, and in the Environmental Humanities more broadly. Her new book project explores the various forms of how migration was discussed and represented in German Romanticism.