w i l l i a m k e ac h for attacking the commercial literary production he was already satirizing in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.17 More certainly than any of his contemporaries, Byron would have grasped the force of Adorno’s paradox: “unless [art] reifies itself, it becomes a commodity.” The question for him was not whether this was his and every other poet’s fate, but whether in becoming commodities, poems necessarily surrender their potential for expressive and critical self-determination IV The history of lyric poetry has always included a resistance to history; it has always valued the momentary suspension, if not the ultimate transcendence, of historical determination Some of the greatest poems of British Romanticism – Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” – express a desire for such suspension or transcendence within contexts that include the defining counter-pressures of transpersonal circumstances and constraints From the vantage point of the Adornian theory of lyric that I have been working with and against in this chapter, we need to understand how the resistance to history in these and other Romantic lyrics is itself historical – a defining aspect of the terms on which such lyrics become what Benjamin calls “documents of civilization.” We also need to understand how such lyric resistance to history is integral to Adorno’s principle that all art stands in an inherently contradictory relationship to the social: “art becomes social by its opposition to society, and it occupies this position only as autonomous art.”18 Adorno’s aesthetic of dialectical negation runs counter to much of the recent historicist work on Romantic lyric, with its affirmative emphasis on the evident and elaborated historicity of poetic representation, production, and reception Under the conditions of capitalist modernity, “subjective expression,” the ostensibly traditional term in Adorno’s conception of lyric, constructs itself as textual materiality through its formal resistance to and distance from the “social antagonism” that constitutes all art’s contextual grounding This kind of essentialist approach to lyric, as we have seen, significantly limits our ability to read the full range of Romantic poetry’s relationship to commodity culture It has the advantage, however, of insisting on an anti-historical, counter-social impulse that remains extremely important to Romantic lyric, even if it does not – as Adorno would have it – establish a universal defining criterion for what the entire lyric mode can be I conclude this chapter by looking briefly at a sequence of textual examples that invite us to read with an Adornian awareness of the historicity of lyric’s resistance to history – and with an adjusted sense of the seductions of the 230 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008