Forays into a Form Grown Wild
Cordula A. Grewe · 2021
Leaving behind the grand narratives of ancient heroes and Christian martyrs with their laws of plot, one-point perspective, and pantomime expressivity, the poets extracted from this rich and intricate tradition of a borderland a key principle of Romantic writing: the arabesque. A word on terminology is in order here, for the modern arabesque grew out of two competing traditions originally separated as distinct, individually named categories. Stripped of its physical thingness through the absorption into the literary, the Romantic arabesque, reflecting upon the existential media shift at play in much of the era’s creative experimentation, could assume the kind of hybridity needed, in 1800, to kindle a new language and a new way of writing. One of the arabesque’s hallmarks is its infinity, an infinity nurtured by the possibility of an endless repetition of geometric patterns or by a continuous growth of organic forms into ever new branches, sprouts, and tendrils.