You may well be right on the musical aspect, and that being the
explanation for the lyric emphasis.
As for Poe, Adorno's regard for him may well reach back to reading
him in translation: Poe was fashionable in late 19th century Germany,
just as he was in France.
Tony
On 28 May 2006, at 02:40, Edmund Hardy wrote:
> Tony,
>
>> I think his later point about "heitere Kunst" (cheerful art) is
>> an indicator as well: in German there are at least two words for
>> what we call poetry, and the more common is not Poesie, but Lyrik
>> - which explains why some commentators have specified lyric
>> poetry as being what he meant, although the word Adorno himself
>> used in these formulations was always das Gedicht: the poem.
>
> Yes, but he is also often implicitly or explicity talking about
> poetry as a musical form, which is a more compelling reason for
> translating it as "lyric poetry".
>
>> My point was that he didn't read poetry in English, as far as I
>> am aware: I imagine that he did read philosophy, sociology, art
>> history and so forth in that language.
>
> I think this is largely right, though he does return to Poe's
> poetry in several places, regarding an idea of "newness".
>
> The idea of a possible impossibility is of course a sort of
> vanishing point which the negative dialectic points up on the field
> - for poetry in On Lyric Poetry and Society, what surfaces in the
> lyric may break it apart, the burden of sufferings may be too great
> for the possible forms, etc.
>
> Edmund
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