Semblance and the Romantic Lyric

For Adorno, lyric poetry shuns "mere" semblance (Schein) to embody instead a purer form of "expression"-a rejection of simple mimesis in favor of subjective truth. But, as he also writes, it is precisely semblance that makes expression or "nonsemblance" possible, and great art will entail the "redemption" of semblance. Adorno retrieves his notion of semblance from Romantic-period philosophy, and this essay traces a backwards movement through key Romantic and post-Romantic lyrics to reconstruct a sense of the density of semblance at it exists in Romanticism. It argues that seemingness is made a key part of poetry's essence as well as substance in Romanticism: words like "seems" and "appears" take center stage within the fiction of a poem, and play foundational roles within poetry's thinking. In this way, the essay unfolds new readings of Christina Rossetti, Keats, and Wordsworth as poets concerned with appearances, and also contributes a new understanding of what it might mean, in art, to try to redeem semblance.