Poetry after Auschwitz: Notes on Articles Milind Sent me

Billy Mills

How poetry can be written after Auschwitz

In his long poem about the Holocaust, Charles Reznikoff uses court records and a matter-of-fact tone to give due weight to their horror

Reznikoff is on record as saying that his legal studies led him to the insight that poetry should be like the evidence given by a witness in a criminal trial; "not a statement of what he felt, but of what he saw or heard".

If Adorno's question is "how can anyone write poetry that can comprehend the barbarity of the Holocaust", Reznikoff's response is "by doing what the artist has always done and finding the appropriate technical means".

Published just a year before his death in 1976, Holocaust was Reznikoff's last book. It, too, draws on court records, this time The Trials of the Major War Criminals at Nuremberg and the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. The literal, matter-of-fact style that Reznikoff uses in the poem is not accidental; it is a conscious technical choice. The horrors of the death camps are placed starkly before us in the words of the survivors, and the poet's selection process denies the reader the opportunity to look away. It also deprives us of any sense of catharsis; these things happened and no good came of them. There is no redemption, and no place for the reader to hide in the flat surface of the writing:

If Adorno's question is "how can anyone write poetry that can comprehend the barbarity of the Holocaust", Reznikoff's response is "by doing what the artist has always done and finding the appropriate technical means"

POETRY AFTER AUSCHWITZ? CELAN AND ADORNO REVISITED

BY JOHN ZILCOSKY

But such critics fail to see that Adorno's statement is itself poetic, making use of figurative language: "Auschwitz" is a metaphor or, more specifically, a synecdoche, in which one extermination camp substitutes for the entire mass murder of the European Jews. ... Moreover, "ein Gedicht" stands in synecdochally for art and culture in toto. ...  Rather, he views both (philosophy and poetry) as likely accomplices in the minimization and beautification of Auschwitz, leading him in 1966 to claim that all "culture after Auschwitz" and all the  "criticism" of this  culture were "garbage."

... A truly critical art therefore must have a revolutionary structure, must unsettle the grammar of authority. By insisting on this politics of form, Adorno's aesthetic theory is akin to Celan's poetry. It is not surprising that Adorno, in his later "Asthetische Theorie" (1970), explicitly admires Celan's 'radical' hermetic form: it reveals the "shame of art" in the face of "suffering" ... Only a revolution in form could unsettle the dominant social structures.

Critics have repeatedly asserted — without evidence - that Adorno’s late

approbation, like his famous 1966 claim that “it may have been wrong” to say

that “no poems can be written after Auschwitz,”" proves that he “recanted”

after reading Celan.‘6 But it is more accurate to view Adorno’s post-1966 com-

ments as his inevitable acknowledgement of the two men’s long-shared suspi-

cion of and hope for poetic language: their sense that only a revolution in form

could overturn dominant social structures.1? Celan thus did not work to

“rebut” Adorno’s “ban.” Rather, he worked with Adorno — tacitly — to docu-

micnt modern poetry’s crisis and uncover, within this crisis, a critical poetic

speaking that might not be barbaric after Auschwitz.18

The most obvious place to begin a discussion of Celan’s poetic form is with

rhyme. Celan began writing poetry already in the late 1930s as a teenager, and,

until his release from fascist labor camps in 1944, his poetry was formally .

traditional. It featured strong cadences, suggestive metaphors, alliteration, and, most centrally,

thyme. Of the ninety-eight poems Celan wrote between 1938 and 1944, the

vast majority are rhymed.

* But already in the camps ~ where the young Celan

sytote at least seventy-five poems — he begins to develop what will later become

his trademark suspicion of accepted form: he starts to regard rhyme with cir-

cumspection and irony. 

By employing rhyming verse to tell the story of a murder, Celan deliberately

juxtaposes traditional euphonic torm with brutal content. He similarly ex-

presses his distrust of melodious structures one year later, when he undercuts

the prettiness of rhyme in his quatrains about autumnal solitude, Der Einsame.

Here, again, violence is rhymed. What is more, Celan again infuses poetic

propriety with aggression, specifically by connecting harmonious Romantic

imagery (“Schleier” and “Stickerein”) with hostilicy (“Geier” and

“schrein”).2!

This burgeoning suspicion of rhyme finally becomes overt in Celan’s 1944

poem written just after returning from internment, Nahe der Griber. Celan

begins this scries of rhymed couplets by redirecting traditional Romantic long-

ing (Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen bliihn2)** with bitter irony toward

the site of his parents’ murder on the river Bug:

But this formal inventiveness should not be empty experimentation, Adorno

continues; it must be immediately intertwined with “suffering” (Leiden). Art

can only find adequate “expression” for this suffering when it “confronts” —

and challenges — stylistic “tradition.” °° Suffering is thus the element that distin-

guishes real “art”

HERMETIC POETRY