Indeed, it was Adorno, but the quote is a bit thornier than people recollect (after all, it's Adorno). There are actually 2 quotes: one, the original statement, then a later (modified) retraction: In 1949, in "Cultural Critique and Society" Adorno writes: "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today." Then, in *Negative Dialectics* he writes: "Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems."