Mörike’s ‘naive’ lyrics were virtuosic and historically self-aware

Evidence

The poems of the hypochondriac parish priest of Cleversulzbach, who is usually seen as a naïve artist, are virtuoso pieces which none of the masters of art for art’s sake ever succeeded in outdoing. The hollowness and ideological quality of the sublime style are as familiar to him as the low style of the Biedermeier period, with its petty-bourgeois dullness, blind to the totalitythe period in which most of his poetry was written. The sublime style drives his intellect to create once again images that suggest neither the drawing-room nor the alehouse, neither vociferation nor slobbering. The last echoes of sublimity in style are dying away in him, surviving only as memories; it is stranded on a narrow ridge, but linked to all the signs of an immediate life, which promised endorsement at the very moment they themselves had already been condemned by the trend of history. Both aspects greet the poet, on a ramble, only as they fade away. He already has a share in the paradox of lyric poetry in the approaching industrial age. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2223

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges the ‘naïve poet’ reading of Mörike — a reversal analogous to the reader’s past interest in demystifying received artistic reputations. — connects to: Adorno read the naive poet Mörike as a knowing virtuoso of a dying sublimity — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2223
• DEFINE: Clarifies Adorno’s concept of the ‘paradox of lyric poetry in the industrial age’ — lyric as a doomed, narrowing preserve of immediacy.