Lyric Commodity Critique, Benjamin Adorno Marx, Baudelaire Baudelaire Baudelaire

Extract

So how important is modern lyric poetry?

Answers will depend on who's answering—and what they understand by modern, lyric, and poetry. Academic and other cultural institutions will hardly have the only say; the most significant testimonies often come from poets themselves, who in relation to matters academic and institutional may have feet in more than one camp but who perhaps finally have, in proportion to the intensity and overall achievement of their art, no camp at all. Yet an at least century-long critical tradition, which Marjorie Perloff's 2006 MLA Presidential Address joins, has salutarily maintained that for all academia's evident weaknesses—including an often fatal distance from the realities of artistic making and audience engagement—it can still contribute crucially to the life of poetry. In that light, it's worth reconsidering a body of work that for decades has resonated in the larger poetry world but has also known academic prominence: Frankfurt school—and the wider spectrum of Marxian and Marxian-inflected—critical theory. What if, in ways that have mostly escaped notice, a signal exchange between Frankfurt school critics demonstrates (with lessons aplenty for poetry, criticism, and theory today) that, far from merely illustrating theoretical and sociohistorical dynamics, the development of modern lyric animates or generates the theory in the first place, locating itself at the heart of Frankfurt school and related attempts to take history's measure and to enable reflective judgment and critical agency?