The poet’s estranged belonging produces the ache at the heart of Mörike’s poem

Evidence

Only he, the poet, perceives it [the art object, i.e. the lamp] in its unobtrusive beauty. He has entered from outside. He comes from the world of everyday life, which has brought him, like everyone else, down to earth. Who can resist the spirit of the times? But the nobler faculties of his mind are not yet extinguished. Presently they are touched by the work of art, and, as he remains there, the fair world that has passed away raises itself once more, and seems once again to be presentwrapped up in the allure of strangeness', we might say, using an expression from the poem Göttliche Reminiszenz’. For the poet himself has long since lost his familiarity with such things. Beauty, however, still pleases him, just as his verses please us. We may now understand pleasure [Anmut] better, in its literal sense, on the basis of Mörike’s contemporary situation. He is not the master of the house in which the lamp is hanging. There seems to be no master at all there any more. But he still feels he belongs there; he dares, or at least half dares, to see himself as an initiate. It is perhaps precisely this that produces the mixture of pain and beauty that gives the poem its magic. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2226

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains Adorno’s reading of Anmut as pleasure rooted in the poet’s contemporary estranged situation, not mere aesthetic delight.
• XREF: Connects to Adorno’s wider aesthetic theory of art as utopian anticipation emerging from a damaged world. — connects to: Adorno read the naive poet Mörike as a knowing virtuoso of a dying sublimity — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2223; A poet’s deepest pains can be radically severed from public and political experience — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 216