Adorno read lyric poems as recordings of a historical moment of loss

Evidence

Using as examples Eduard Mörike’s Auf einer Wanderung' and Stefan George's Im windes-weben’ from the poem cycle Der siebte Ring, Adorno demonstrated what it meant to identify the historical moment that a poem recorded by interpreting it in terms of society. He saw in Mörike the beginning of a phase in which lyric poetry only continued to be possible as a tenuous, fragile appeal to the dream of immediacy in lifewithin a society which was more and more clearly destroying that dream. Lyric poetry had reacted to increased difficulties in invoking the dream by engaging in a process of purifying and sharpening the means it had at its disposal to preserve it. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2222

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Adorno’s broader aesthetics in the culture-industry essay and his claim that art registers social suffering — resonates with the reader’s critical-theory interest in how aesthetic form encodes history. — connects to: Adorno read the naive poet Mörike as a knowing virtuoso of a dying sublimity — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2223; Adorno links music’s origin to the gesture of weeping and release — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1262; Adorno read poems as historical records of society’s contradictions — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2221 (+1 more)
• SEED: An essay angle: how ‘immediacy’ became a compensatory fiction in industrial society, traced through the formal purification of lyric language — a lineage from Mörike to modernism.

Broader Connections

• Adorno defined the new music as structured longing for vanished meaning #corroborates (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 285