60 contemporary poetry
a mouth’ (p. 242 ). Auden proposes that poetry is an enduring art
form, a dynamic method of articulation.
Theodor Adorno’s infamous statement that ‘to write poetry
after Auschwitz is barbaric’ appears at the end of his 1949 essay
‘Cultural Criticism and Society’.^6 Critics originally took it as a
judgement upon the impossibility of writing lyric poetry follow-
ing the Holocaust. Mechanised mass murder at Auschwitz oblit-
erated the concept of individual suffering; as a result the idea of
the viability of the single expressive voice in poetry is called into
the question. However, Adorno later refl ected upon the original
statement and insisted upon the necessity of continuing to write
poetry:
I once said that after Auschwitz one could no longer write
poetry, and that gave rise to a discussion I did not anticipate... I would readily concede that, just as I said that after
Auschwitz one could not write poems – by which I meant
to point to the hollowness of the resurrected culture of that
time – it could equally well be said, on the other hand, that
one must write poems.^7
Adorno’s original statement takes us through a dialectical pro-
nouncement: to write a poetry that infers the Holocaust, risks
diminishing the catastrophe to a complicit artistic representation;
equally a poetry that refuses to acknowledge the Holocaust serves
only to silence history. His later refl ection indicates that poetry
needed to change and expresses the desire for poetry to serve as
ethical witness.
When interviewed in the 1980 s during the height of ‘The
Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney refl ects upon the
question whether poetry can respond to barbarism:
Can you write a poem in the post-nuclear age? Can you write
a poem that gazes at death, or the western front, or Auschwitz- a poem that gives peace and tells horror? It gives true peace
only if horror is satisfactorily rendered. If the eyes are not
averted from it. If its overmastering power is acknowledged
and unconcerned, so the human spirit holds its own against