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

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.