Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry

For Paulin in this essay, the political poem is motivated by aesthetic
ideals and not initiated by allegiances to any particular party line. The
importance of the poem lies in how it embodies ëa general historical
awarenessí:

Although the imagination can be strengthened rather than distorted by ideology,

my definition of a political poem does not assume that such poems necessarily

make an ideological statement. Instead they can embody a general historical

awareness ñ an observation of the rain ñ rather than offering a specific attitude

to state affairs.^10

Paulin moves from the affairs of the nation-state to suggest that the
political poem need not contain a prescriptive message; its historicity
lies in the way in which it becomes a record of a particular moment of
writing. As a record of a personal or public moment, the aesthetic
space holds within it the possibility of being political. This is a more
subtle definition of politics than can usually be expected from Paulin
and it is comparable with the position of Theodor Adorno.
Adornoís essay on ëCommitmentí (1965) argues that a

work of art that is committed strips the magic from a work of art that is content

to be a fetish, an idle pastime for those who would like to sleep through the

deluge that threatens them, in an apoliticism that is in fact deeply political.^11

For Adorno, there is no refuge for aesthetics from politics since even
the ëapoliticismí of certain works of art is deeply political. As with
Paulinís argument: ëCommitted art in the proper sense is not intended
to generate ameliorative measures, legislative acts or practical insti-
tutions [Ö] but to work at the level of fundamental attitudes.í^12
Adorno concludes:

In Germany, commitment often means bleating what everyone is already saying

or at least secretly wants to hear. The notion of a ëmessageí in art, even when

politically radical, already contains an accommodation to the world: the stance

10 Ibid., p.105.
11 Theodor Adorno, ‘Commitment’, Aesthetics and Politics, trans. Francis
MacDonagh, R. Livingstone, P. Anderson, F. Mulhern, eds., New Left Books,
p.177. First published as Noten zur Literatur, III (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1965).
12 Ibid., p.91.