Romanticism and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

Sociopolitical (i.e., Romantic) Difficulty in Modern Poetry and Aesthetics

Robert Kaufman, Stanford University

Notes

^* For their responses to earlier versions of this essay I am grateful to Bill Brown, Adam Casdin, Norma Cole, Jonathan Culler, Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Kevin Lamb, Saree Makdisi, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Lisa Steinman, Arthur Strum, Robert von Hallberg, and Alex Woloch. I am also indebted to numerous former colleagues from a different, sometimes overlapping world, including especially Robert Remar, initially of the National Labor Relations Board and, later, counsel to the International Longshore and Warehouse Workers Union, AFL-CIO; the late Maxine Auerbach, initially of the National Labor Relations Board and then counsel to numerous San Francisco Bay Area unions; Michael Eisenscher, former Field Organizer for the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America; Mary Ann Massenburg, District 65, United Automobile Workers of America, AFL-CIO; and David Borgen, Communication Workers of America, AFL-CIO. A somewhat different version of this essay was written for (and will appear in) Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena, eds. Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb (forthcoming from Stanford University Press, 2003).
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¹ For a quick rehearsal of the film’s background and the labor history it tells, see Jackson 180-193.
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² For a useful, essentially orthodox Marxian recounting of this Thomas-and-the-Left history, see Paananen, "Dylan Thomas As Social Writer: Toward a Caudwellian Reading."
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³ For discussion see, for example, Cascardi, Consequences of Enlightenment; Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime; Caygill, Art of Judgment; and Kaufman, "Red Kant" and "Negatively Capable Dialectics."
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⁴ See Adorno’s quite Benjaminian "On Lyric Poetry and Society," 44, 43; "Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft," 87, 85. For more on the history and theory of Benjamin’s and Adorno’s approaches to lyric, see Kaufman, "Aura, Still" and "Adorno's Social Lyric, and Literary Criticism Today: Poetics, Aesthetics, Modernity."
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⁵ Adorno here again seeks to telescope Benjamin’s prodigious although largely uncompleted writings on Baudelaire into a few pages.
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⁶ For sustained treatment of Frankfurt-School analyses of the Baudelairean counter-tradition in modern lyric, and for Benjamin’s, Brecht’s, and Adorno’s surprising later indications that lyric aura might have a renewed, progressive role to play in contemporary poetry and theory (after lyric's apparent supervention by mechanical-technical reproduction or reproducibility), see Kaufman, "Aura, Still."
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⁷ While Herbert Marcuse—and the Benjamin of the mid-1930s—would be obvious instances, the case is perhaps best made by considering the most ostensibly Mandarin of the Frankfurt critics; in that light, see, for example, the May 5, 1969 interview with Adorno that appeared in Der Spiegel under the title "Keine Angst vor dem Elfenbeinturm," trans. Gerhard Richter [the literary critic, not the painter] under the title "Who's Afraid of the Ivory Tower? A Conversation with Theodor W. Adorno."
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⁸ See, again, Kaufman, "Aura, Still" (esp. 73-74, n.46). For a valuable consideration of how the triangulated crises of aura, experience, and conceptuality inform an always-implicit ethical theory in Adornian and Frankfurt thought, see J.M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics. See also Walter Benjamin, "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire" and "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" in Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections; "Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire," and "Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire." See too Adorno, Benjamin, Briefwechsel 1928-1940 (138 ff., 364 ff., and 388 ff.); in English, The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940 (104 ff., 280 ff., and 298 ff.). Finally, see Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History"; "Über den Begriff der Geschichte."
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⁹ For a simultaneously comprehensive and succinct meditation on these ideas about constellative form in critical writing—and for an identification of Benjamin as the greatest theorist and practitioner of such writing—see Adorno, "The Essay as Form"; "Der Essay als Form."
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¹⁰ For an extended discussion, see Kaufman, "Aura, Still" (esp. 74-79).
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¹¹Barbara Guest and Laurie Reid, Symbiosis (n.p.). Guest’s recent work also includes the Adorno-invoking Rocks on a Platter: Notes on Literature and If So, Tell Me; see also her Stripped Tales and Quill, Solitary, APPARITION. These and other volumes of Guest’s poetry have been published by smaller presses whose books may sometimes prove difficult to find. I should therefore add that most of Guest's work—and that of other poets often associated with experimental traditions—is available through the (non-profit) Small Press Distribution, the leading such distributor in the United States, at 1341 Seventh Street, Berkeley, CA 94710, (510)524-1668 or (800)869-7553, fax (510)524-0852, orders@spdbooks.org, <http://www.spdbooks.org>.
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¹² For more specific treatment of Guest’s relationship to the early and continuing reception of Frankfurt School aesthetics in the United States, see Kaufman, "A Future for Modernism: Barbara Guest’s Recent Poetry."
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¹³ For some of Palmer’s more recent work, see At Passages; The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995; The Promises of Glass; and Codes Appearing: Poems 1979-1988. For an example of Palmer’s thoughts on the dialogues between Frankfurt aesthetics and contemporary poetry, see his "Some Notes on Shelley, Poetics, and the Present" (an essay that might best be read in relation to his Sun and At Passages). For a very helpful discussion of Palmer, see David Levi Strauss, "Aporia and Amnesia."
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