Thinking and Writing with Leaves: Poplar Sympoetics in Romanticism

Abstract

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.