"The Heart's Residuum": Adorno's Metaphysical Experience in Stevens's "Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas"

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Although Wallace Stevens and Theodor W. Adorno respond in distinct ways to the Holocaust, their works have a theoretical affinity. In 1940, Stevens writes a poem that, while it cannot register the unfathomable catastrophe, does speculate about the fate of the imagination in a world turned into an enormous camp through total war. Adorno, who most famously responds in his dictum against poetry after Auschwitz, develops a minimal theory of what he calls metaphysical experience. What for Adorno is the dialectical category of metaphysical experience is for Stevens poetics.