San Marco in the Muck: Goethe's Venetian Epigrams and the Poetry of Emergent Form

abstract: Goethe's Venetian Epigrams (1790/1795) takes off from a mood of artistic, social, and political crisis, calls upon Goethe's own morphological investigations, and positions itself at the poetic boundary. Binding together this seemingly disparate collection is Goethe's fascination with form, including the representational affordances of the epigram itself. The central question is this: How can the artist shape the world while remaining true to it, thereby fostering rather than disfiguring emergent forms? The cycle unfolds an epigrammatic ethos of encounter, a mode of interaction that represents an alternative to the varieties of violent imposition to which the poet also bears witness.