Theodor Adorno, "Parataxis: On Hölderlin's Late Poetry," trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen

 THE ENGLISH VERSION can be found in Notes to Literature, Volume II, if you are interested. Dates from 1960. Heidegger only crops up in the essay a few times, but he is definitely in Adorno's crosshairs.

I found this a demanding read, with its paragraphs sometimes stretching past the two-page mark and sentences such as "The sublimation of primary docility to become autonomy, however, is that supreme passivity that found its formal correlative in the technique of seriation." Hmm, okay. After three passes at such pronouncements, I tend to give up and plunge ahead, hoping things will clear up later. In other words, if you want a truly accurate précis of Adorno's argument, you will have to look elsewhere than here.

A few points emerged for me, though. The content of a poem is not what it explicitly states, Adorno writes--that is, not simply equivalent to the propositions it makes. How things are said matters as much as what is said. The form is part of the content. So far, so good--Heidegger would not dissent from that, I imagine. However, when Adorno writes, "Every interpretation of poetry that formulates it as Aussage [message] violates poetry's mode of  truth by violating its illusory character," I have a feeling he sees Heidegger as one such violator.

Heidegger definitely might dissent from the next part of Adorno's argument, which is that the form of Hölderlin's later poems (the Hymns, mainly) is dialectically engaged with (what we will call) the propositional content of the poems. That is, the sentences of the poems may be saying one kind of thing, but the form of those sentences--their parataxes, the ways they scramble or abandon classic Ciceronian sentence construction--is saying another kind of thing, posing a challenge to the propositional content of those very sentences. Thus, the truth content of the poem is not at all identical to the truth (or otherwise) of the propositions of the poem. 

I'm not in a position to judge how strong Adorno's evidence for this argument is, relying as I do on English translations of Hölderlin. But it made sense, as a general argument, and lines up with the widespread tendency to see Hölderlin as anticipating the ruptures of literary modernism (Adorno sees him a precursor to Beckett, for instance). 

I had not read Adorno on poetry before this--apart from his famous parenthetical aside that writing it after Auschwitz was barbaric--and I have to admit I was enlightened and impressed. I will have to build up some stamina before attempting another, though.