Lyric Poetry and Society

Abstract

Lyric poetry shows itself most thoroughly integrated into society at those points where it does not repeat what society says— where it conveys no pronouncements—but rather where the speaking subject (who succeeds in his expression) comes to full accord with the language itself, i.e., with what language seeks by its own inner tendency. Traditional lyric poetry, however, as the strictest aesthetic negation of modern middle-class values, has continued to be bound for just that reason to bourgeois society. In industrial society lyric idea of self-regenerating directness and an immediacy of life—to the extent that it does not merely invoke an impotent romantic past—becomes more and more a condition in which the possible stubbornly flashes its rays over lyric poetry's own impossibility. From the society is taken the ideal of nobility which dictates the choice of every word, image, and sound in the poem; and its form—in some hardly specifiable manner conveyed, as it were, into the linguistic configuration—is medieval.