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In contact with this terrifying beauty in the form of these angels, Rilke is concerned with man's existential angst in trying to come to terms with the coexistance of the spiritual and earthly. He portrays human beings as alone in a universe where God is abstract and possibly non-existant, "where memory and patterns of intuition raise the sensitive consciousness to a realization of solitude."<ref name="DashLangIndiaMatrixDivine" /> He depicts the alternative, an spiritually fulfilling possibility beyond human limitations in the form of angels.<ref>Flemming, Albert Ernest (translator). ''Rainer Maria Rilke: Selected Poems''. (New York:Routledge, 1990), 20-21.</ref> In the ''Elegies'' first line, Rilke's despairing speaker calls upon the angels to notice human suffering and to intervene.<ref>Bruhn, Siglind. ''Musical Ekphrasis in Rilke's Marien-Leben'' (Rodopi, 2000), 28.</ref> There is a deeply-felt despair and unresolvable tension in that no matter man's striving, the limitation of human and earthly existence renders him unable to reach out to the angels.<ref name="DashLangIndiaMatrixDivine" /> The narrative voice Rilke employs in the ''Duino Elegies'' strives "to achieve in human consciousness the angel's presumed plenitude of being." (''[[Dasein]]'')<ref>Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. “Immanent Transcendence in Rilke and Stevens” in ''The German Quarterly'' Volume 83, Issue 3 (Summer, 2010), 275-296.</ref>
In contact with this terrifying beauty in the form of these angels, Rilke is concerned with man's existential angst in trying to come to terms with the coexistance of the spiritual and earthly. He portrays human beings as alone in a universe where God is abstract and possibly non-existant, "where memory and patterns of intuition raise the sensitive consciousness to a realization of solitude."<ref name="DashLangIndiaMatrixDivine" /> He depicts the alternative, an spiritually fulfilling possibility beyond human limitations in the form of angels.<ref>Flemming, Albert Ernest (translator). ''Rainer Maria Rilke: Selected Poems''. (New York:Routledge, 1990), 20-21.</ref> In the ''Elegies'' first line, Rilke's despairing speaker calls upon the angels to notice human suffering and to intervene.<ref>Bruhn, Siglind. ''Musical Ekphrasis in Rilke's Marien-Leben'' (Rodopi, 2000), 28.</ref> There is a deeply-felt despair and unresolvable tension in that no matter man's striving, the limitation of human and earthly existence renders him unable to reach out to the angels.<ref name="DashLangIndiaMatrixDivine" /> The narrative voice Rilke employs in the ''Duino Elegies'' strives "to achieve in human consciousness the angel's presumed plenitude of being." (''[[Dasein]]'')<ref>Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. “Immanent Transcendence in Rilke and Stevens” in ''The German Quarterly'' Volume 83, Issue 3 (Summer, 2010), 275-296.</ref>


Rilke uses the images of love and of lovers as a way of showing man's potential and his failures in achieving the transcendent understanding embodied by the angels. In the Second Elegy, he writes that "Lovers, if Angels could understand them, might utter / strange things in the midnight air." (''Liebende könnten, verstünden sie's, in der Nachtluft / wunderlich reden.'')<ref>Second Elegy, lines 37-38</ref> He depicts "the inadequacy of ordinary lovers" and constrasts a feminine form of "sublime love" and a masculine "blind animal passion."<ref>Leishman, Spender, 96</ref> According to Leishman and Spender, at the time the first elegies were written, Rilke often "expressed a longing for human companionship and affection, and then, often immediately afterwards, asking whether he could really respond to such companionship if it were offered to him..."<ref>Leishman, J. B., and Spender, Stephen, 91.</ref> He notices a "decline in the lives of lovers...when they began to received, they also began to lose the power of giving."<ref>Leishman, Spender, 103.</ref> Later, during World War I, he would lament that "the world has fallen into the hands of men.<ref>Leishman, Spender, 97</ref><ref>Rilke, Later Poems, 230-231.</ref> In the face of death, life and love, however, is not cheap and meaningless. Rilke would assert that the true meaning of love could be understood through death giving it its true place in this whole--that "the nature of every ultimate love...is only able to reach the loved one in the infinite."<ref>Leishman, Spender, 103, 122.</ref><ref>Rilke, Briefe aus den Jahren 1914-1921, 125</ref>
Rilke uses the images of love and of lovers as a way of showing man's potential and his failures in achieving the transcendent understanding embodied by the angels. In the Second Elegy, he writes that "Lovers, if Angels could understand them, might utter / strange things in the midnight air." (''Liebende könnten, verstünden sie's, in der Nachtluft / wunderlich reden.'')<ref>Second Elegy, lines 37-38</ref> He depicts "the inadequacy of ordinary lovers" and constrasts a feminine form of "sublime love" and a masculine "blind animal passion."<ref>Leishman, Spender, 96</ref> According to Leishman and Spender, at the time the first elegies were written, Rilke often "expressed a longing for human companionship and affection, and then, often immediately afterwards, asking whether he could really respond to such companionship if it were offered to him..."<ref>Leishman, J. B., and Spender, Stephen, 91.</ref> He notices a "decline in the lives of lovers...when they began to received, they also began to lose the power of giving."<ref>Leishman, Spender, 103.</ref> Later, during World War I, he would lament that "the world has fallen into the hands of men.<ref>Leishman, Spender, 97</ref><ref>Rilke, Later Poems, 230-231.</ref> In the face of death, life and love, however, is not cheap and meaningless. In fact, it is the destiny of great lovers that is essential for understanding all three—life, love, and death—as part of a unity.<ref>Leishman, Spender, 105.</ref> Rilke would assert that the true meaning of love could be understood through death giving it its true place in this whole--that "the nature of every ultimate love...is only able to reach the loved one in the infinite."<ref>Leishman, Spender, 103, 122.</ref><ref>Rilke, Briefe aus den Jahren 1914-1921, 125</ref>


In a 1923 letter to Nanny von Escher, Rilke confided that,
In a 1923 letter to Nanny von Escher, Rilke confided that,
Line 42: Line 42:


[[File:Family of Saltimbanques.JPG|thumb|right|300px|Rilke wrote his Fifth Elegy inspired by his memory seeing Picasso's painting ''Les Saltimbanques'' (1905) in Paris several years earlier.]]
[[File:Family of Saltimbanques.JPG|thumb|right|300px|Rilke wrote his Fifth Elegy inspired by his memory seeing Picasso's painting ''Les Saltimbanques'' (1905) in Paris several years earlier.]]
The Fifth Elegy is largely inspired by [[Pablo Picasso]]'s 1905 [[Picasso's Rose Period|Rose period]] painting, ''[[Family of Saltimbanques|Les Saltimbanques]]'' ("The Acrobats", also known as "The Family of Saltimbanques") in which Picasso depicts six figures pictured "in the middle of a desert landscape and it is impossible to say whether they are arriving or departing, beginning or ending their performance."<ref>Leishman, Spender, 102</ref> Rilke, according to Leishman and Spender, depicted them as about to begin, and that they were used as a symbol of "human activity...always travelling and with no fixed abode, they are even a shade more fleeting than the rest of us, whose fleetingness was lamented." Further, Rilke described them as standing on a "threadbare carpet" to suggest "the ultimate loneliness and isolation of Man in this incomprehensible world, practicing their profession from childhood to death as playthings of an unknown will...before their 'pure too-little; had passed into 'empty too-much'<ref>Leishman, Spender, 102-103.</ref>
The Fifth Elegy is largely inspired by [[Pablo Picasso]]'s 1905 [[Picasso's Rose Period|Rose Period]] painting, ''[[Family of Saltimbanques|Les Saltimbanques]]'' ("The Acrobats", also known as "The Family of Saltimbanques") in which Picasso depicts six figures pictured "in the middle of a desert landscape and it is impossible to say whether they are arriving or departing, beginning or ending their performance."<ref>Leishman, Spender, 102</ref> Rilke, according to Leishman and Spender, depicted them as about to begin, and that they were used as a symbol of "human activity...always travelling and with no fixed abode, they are even a shade more fleeting than the rest of us, whose fleetingness was lamented." Further, Rilke described them as standing on a "threadbare carpet" to suggest "the ultimate loneliness and isolation of Man in this incomprehensible world, practicing their profession from childhood to death as playthings of an unknown will...before their 'pure too-little; had passed into 'empty too-much'<ref>Leishman, Spender, 102-103.</ref>
Because of the profound impact that the war had on him, Rilke expressed a hope in an 1919 letter that the task of the intellectual in a post-war world would be to render the world right. It would be "to prepare in men's hearts the way for those gentle, mysterious, trembling transformations from which alone the understandings and harmonies of a serener future will proceed."<ref>Rilke, Rainer Maria. ''Briefe aus den Jahren 1914-1921'', 165.</ref> Rilke envisioned his ''Elegies'' and the ''Sonnets to Orpheus'' as part of his contribution.<ref>Leishman, Spender, 14.</ref>
Because of the profound impact that the war had on him, Rilke expressed a hope in an 1919 letter that the task of the intellectual in a post-war world would be to render the world right. It would be "to prepare in men's hearts the way for those gentle, mysterious, trembling transformations from which alone the understandings and harmonies of a serener future will proceed."<ref>Rilke, Rainer Maria. ''Briefe aus den Jahren 1914-1921'', 165.</ref> Rilke envisioned his ''Elegies'' and the ''Sonnets to Orpheus'' as part of his contribution.<ref>Leishman, Spender, 14.</ref>

Revision as of 22:38, 4 February 2013

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

The Duino Elegies (Template:Lang-de) are a collection of ten elegies written by the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). Rilke, who is "widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets,"[1] began writing the elegies in 1912 while a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis (1855-1934) at Duino Castle, near Trieste on the Adriatic Sea. The poems were dedicated to the Princess upon their publication in 1923. During this ten-year period, the elegies languished incomplete for long stretches of time as Rilke suffered frequently from severe depression—some of which was caused by the events of World War I and his conscripted military service. Aside from brief episodes of writing in 1913 and 1915, Rilke did not return to the work until a few years after the war ended. With a sudden, renewed inspiration—writing in a frantic pace he described as "a savage creative storm"—he completed the collection in February 1922 while staying at Château de Muzot in Veyras, in Switzerland's Rhone Valley. After their publication and his death shortly thereafter, the Duino Elegies were quickly recognized by critics and scholars as Rilke's most important work.[2][3]

The Duino Elegies are intensely religious, mystical poems that weigh beauty and existential suffering.[4] The poems employ a rich symbolism of angels and salvation but not in keeping with typical Christian intrepretations. Rilke begins the first elegy in an invocation of philosophical despair, asking: "Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the heirarchies of angels?" (Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?) [5] and later declares that "every angel is terrifying" (Jeder Engel ist schrecklich).[6] While labelling of these poems as "elegies" would typically imply melancholy and lamentation, many passages are marked by their positive energy and "unrestrained enthusiasm."[2] Together, the Duino Elegies are described as a metamorphosis of Rilke's "ontological torment" and an "impassioned monologue about coming to terms with human existence" discussing themes of "the limitations and insufficiency of the human condition and fractured human consciousness...man's loneliness, the perfection of the angels, life and death, love and lovers, and the task of the poet." [7]

Writing and publication history

Duino Castle near Trieste, Italy, was where Rilke began writing the Duino Elegies in 1912--recounting that he heard the famous first line as a voice in the wind while walking along the cliffs and that he wrote it quickly in his notebook.

Duino Castle and the first elegies

In 1910, Rilke had completed writing the loosely autobiographical novel, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge) in which a young poet is terrified by the fragmentation and chaos of modern urban life. After completing the work, Rilke experienced a severe psychological crisis that did not improve over the next two years.[8] In 1912, still facing this severe depression and despair, Rilke was invited to Duino Castle by Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis (1855-1934) (born Princess Marie zu Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst) who he had met a few years before. The princess (who was twenty years older than Rilke) and her husband Prince Alexander (1851-1939), enthusiastically supported artists and writers.

While at Duino, Rilke and Princess Marie discussed the possibility of collaborating on a translation of Dante Alighieri's La Vita Nuova (1295).[9] After the Princess departed to join her husband at their Lautschin estate, Rilke spent the next few weeks at the castle preparing to focus on work. During these weeks, he was writing Marien-Leben (The Life of Mary).[10] While walking around the Adriatic cliffs near the castle ground, Rilke claimed to hear a voice calling to him speaking the words of the first line, Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen? ("Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the heirarchies of angels?") which he quickly wrote in his notebook. Within days, he produced drafts of the first two elegies in the series and drafted passages and fragments that would later be incorporated in later elegies—including the opening passage of the tenth elegy.[11][12]

Rilke would only finish the third and fourth elegies before the onset of World War I. The third was finished in 1913 in Paris, the fourth in early 1915 in Munich.[13] The effects of the war—particularly his traumatic experiences being conscripted into Austro-Hungarian army—triggered a severe renewal of his depression and would render him silent for several years.

Château de Muzot and the "savage creative storm"

Château de Muzot in Veyras, Switzerland, was where Rilke completed writing the Duino Elegies in "a savage creative storm" in February 1922.

Because of his depression, Rilke was unable to return to writing for several years, and only in 1920 was he motivated to focus toward completing the Elegies. However, for the next two years, his mode of life was unstable and did not permit him the time or mental state he needed for his writing.

In 1921, Rilke journeyed to Switzerland, hoping to immerse himself among French culture near Geneva and to find a place to live permanently.[14]. At the time, he was romantically involved with Baladine Klossowska (1886-1969). At the invitation of Werner Reinhart, Rilke moved into the Château de Muzot a thirteenth century manor that lacked gas and electricity located near Veyras, Rhone Valley, Switzerland.[15] Rilke and Klossowska moved in in July 1921 and during the fall Rilke translated writings by Paul Valery and Michelangelo into German.[16]

With news of the death of his daughter's friend, Wera Knoop, Rilke set to work on Sonnets to Orpheus.[17] Throughout the Sonnets, Wera appears in frequent references to her both direct where he addresses her by name and indirect as allusions to a "dancer" or the mythical Eurydice. Rilke wrote to the young girl's mother stating that her ghost was "commanding and impelling" him to write.[18] In a rush of inspiration that he called "a savage creative storm," Rilke worked on the Sonnets and renewed his focus toward completing the Elegies. In one week, Rilke completed the unfinished elegies and from 2 February to 23 February 1922 he completed all 55 sonnets in both parts of Sonnets to Orpheus.[19] Rilke considered both collections to be "of the same birth."[20][21] Writing in a letter to Klossowska on 9 February 1922, Rilke wrote: "what weighed me down and caused my anguish most is done…I am still trembling from it. …And I went out to caress old Muzot, just now, in the moonlight."[22][23] Two days later, completing the last of his work on the Elegies in the evening, he wrote to Lou Andreas-Salomé, that he had finished "everything in a few days; it was a boundless storm, a hurricane of the spirit, and whatever inside me is like thread and webbing, framework, it all cracked and bent. No thought of food."[24][23]

Publication and reception

Duino Elegies was published in 1923. Prominent critics in the German-speaking countries and abroad praised the work claimed that it invoked the legacy of Hölderlin and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. However, many of the younger generation of poets and writers did not take a liking to Rilke's Elegies because of their obscure symbols and philosophy. Poet Albrecht Schaeffer dismissed them as "mystical blather" and described their "secular theology" as "impotent gossip."[25]

Symbolism and themes

Rilke and his lover, Baladine Klossowska at the Château de Muzot, near Veyras in Switzerland's Rhone Valley (circa 1923). The two pursued an intense but episodic romance that lasted from 1919 until Rilke's death in 1926

Throughout the Duino Elegies, Rilke explores themes of "the limitations and insufficiency of the human condition and fractured human consciousness...man's loneliness, the perfection of the angels, life and death, love and lovers, and the task of the poet." [7] He explores the nature of man's contact with beauty, and its transience, noting that man is forever only getting a brief, momentary glimpse of an inconceivable beauty and that it terrifies him. At the onset of the First Elegy, he describes this frightened experience, defining beauty as

"...nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us."[26]

Rilke depicted this infinite, transcendental beauty with the symbol of angels. However, he did not use the traditional Christian interpretation of angels. He sought to utilize a symbol of the angel that was secular, divorced from religious doctrine and embodied a tremendous transcendental beauty. In this, however, he was greatly influenced by the depiction of angels found in Islam.[27][28] For Rilke, the symbol of the angel represents a perfection that is "beyond human contradictions and limitations" in a "higher level of reality in the invisible." Where there is incongruity that adds to man's despair and anxiety is that because we "cling" to the visible and the familiar, we find the invisible and unknown higher levels represented by these angels to be "terrifying" (in German, schrecklich).[29][3][7]

In contact with this terrifying beauty in the form of these angels, Rilke is concerned with man's existential angst in trying to come to terms with the coexistance of the spiritual and earthly. He portrays human beings as alone in a universe where God is abstract and possibly non-existant, "where memory and patterns of intuition raise the sensitive consciousness to a realization of solitude."[7] He depicts the alternative, an spiritually fulfilling possibility beyond human limitations in the form of angels.[30] In the Elegies first line, Rilke's despairing speaker calls upon the angels to notice human suffering and to intervene.[31] There is a deeply-felt despair and unresolvable tension in that no matter man's striving, the limitation of human and earthly existence renders him unable to reach out to the angels.[7] The narrative voice Rilke employs in the Duino Elegies strives "to achieve in human consciousness the angel's presumed plenitude of being." (Dasein)[32]

Rilke uses the images of love and of lovers as a way of showing man's potential and his failures in achieving the transcendent understanding embodied by the angels. In the Second Elegy, he writes that "Lovers, if Angels could understand them, might utter / strange things in the midnight air." (Liebende könnten, verstünden sie's, in der Nachtluft / wunderlich reden.)[33] He depicts "the inadequacy of ordinary lovers" and constrasts a feminine form of "sublime love" and a masculine "blind animal passion."[34] According to Leishman and Spender, at the time the first elegies were written, Rilke often "expressed a longing for human companionship and affection, and then, often immediately afterwards, asking whether he could really respond to such companionship if it were offered to him..."[35] He notices a "decline in the lives of lovers...when they began to received, they also began to lose the power of giving."[36] Later, during World War I, he would lament that "the world has fallen into the hands of men.[37][38] In the face of death, life and love, however, is not cheap and meaningless. In fact, it is the destiny of great lovers that is essential for understanding all three—life, love, and death—as part of a unity.[39] Rilke would assert that the true meaning of love could be understood through death giving it its true place in this whole--that "the nature of every ultimate love...is only able to reach the loved one in the infinite."[40][41]

In a 1923 letter to Nanny von Escher, Rilke confided that,

"Two inner experiences were necessary for the creation of these books (The Sonnets to Orpheus and The Duino Elegies). One is the increasingly conscious decision to hold life open to death. The other is the spiritual imperative to present, in this wider context, the transformations of love that are not possible in a narrower circle where Death is simply excluded as The Other.[42]

Rilke wrote his Fifth Elegy inspired by his memory seeing Picasso's painting Les Saltimbanques (1905) in Paris several years earlier.

The Fifth Elegy is largely inspired by Pablo Picasso's 1905 Rose Period painting, Les Saltimbanques ("The Acrobats", also known as "The Family of Saltimbanques") in which Picasso depicts six figures pictured "in the middle of a desert landscape and it is impossible to say whether they are arriving or departing, beginning or ending their performance."[43] Rilke, according to Leishman and Spender, depicted them as about to begin, and that they were used as a symbol of "human activity...always travelling and with no fixed abode, they are even a shade more fleeting than the rest of us, whose fleetingness was lamented." Further, Rilke described them as standing on a "threadbare carpet" to suggest "the ultimate loneliness and isolation of Man in this incomprehensible world, practicing their profession from childhood to death as playthings of an unknown will...before their 'pure too-little; had passed into 'empty too-much'[44]

Because of the profound impact that the war had on him, Rilke expressed a hope in an 1919 letter that the task of the intellectual in a post-war world would be to render the world right. It would be "to prepare in men's hearts the way for those gentle, mysterious, trembling transformations from which alone the understandings and harmonies of a serener future will proceed."[45] Rilke envisioned his Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus as part of his contribution.[46]

Legacy

Rilke's work, especially the Duino Elegies, have had an indelible impact on literature and thought. It is claimed as a deep influence by several poets, writers, including Sidney Keyes, Stephen Spender, Robert Bly, W.S. Merwin, John Ashbery, and W.H. Auden, as well as noted philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Hans-Georg Gadamer.

In his book My Belief: Essays on Life and Art, German novelist Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) describes Rilke as evolving within the confines of exploring his existential problems, that "at each stage now and again the miracle occurs, his delicate, hesitant, anxiety-prone person withdraws, and through him resounds the music of the universe; like the basin of a fountain he becomes at once instrument and ear."[1][47]

Rilke's rich symbolism and lyrical rhythms inspired many twentieth century writers, including British poet W.H. Auden (1907-1973), who used the imagery of angels in his work but also alluded to Rilke's writing of the Duino Elegies in his poem cycle Sonnets from China (1936), first published under the title "In Time of War" in Journey to a War (1939),

Tonight in China let me think of one

Who through ten years of silence worked and waited,
Until in Muzot all his powers spoke,
And everything was given once for all.

And with the gratitude of the Completed
He went out in the winter night to stroke
That little tower like a great old animal[48]

The reference here to stroking "that little tower" is derived from a letter wrote to his former lover, Lou Andreas-Salomé, in which after completing the Elegies he writes "I went out and stroked the little Muzot, which protected it and me and finally granted it, like a large old animal."[24]. Rilke expressed a similar sentiment in a letter to his current lover Baladine Klossowska a few days earlier.[22]

Translations

Rilke's Duino Elegies are likely his most popular works in the English-speaking world, and have been translated over twenty times since they were first published in England with a translation by Vita Sackville-West in 1931, and in the United States with a translation by J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender in 1939.

  • Duineser Elegien: Elegies from the Castle of Duino, trans. Vita Sackville-West (Hogarth Press, London, 1931)
  • Duino Elegies, trans. J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender (W. W. Norton, New York, 1939)
  • Duino Elegies, trans. Jessie Lemont (Fine Editions Press, New York, 1945)
  • Duineser Elegien: The Elegies of Duino, trans. Nora Wydenbruck (Amandus, Vienna, 1948
  • Duinesian Elegies, trans. Elaine E. Boney (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1975)
  • Duino Elegies, trans. David Young (W. W. Norton, New York, 1978) ISBN 0-393-30931-2
  • Duino Elegies, trans. Gary Miranda (Azul Editions, Falls Church, VA, 1996) ISBN 885214-07-3
  • Duino Elegies, trans. Robert Hunter w/ block prints by Mareen Hunter (Hulogosi Press, 1989))[49]
  • Duino Elegies trans. Stephen Cohn (Carcanet Press, 1989) ISBN 978-0-85635-837-1
  • Duino-Elegieë trans. H.J. Pieterse from German to Afrikaans (Protea, Pretoria, 2007) ISBN 978-1-86919-151-1
  • Duino Elegies, trans. Martyn Crucefix (Enitharmon Press, London, 2008)

See also

References

Notes

  1. ^ a b [1]. Retrieved 2 February 2013.
  2. ^ a b Hoeniger, F. David. "Symbolism and Pattern in Rilke's Duino Elegies" in German Life and Letters Volume 3, Issue 4, (July 1950), pages 271–283.
  3. ^ a b Perloff, Marjorie. "Reading Gass Reading Rilke" in Parnassus.
  4. ^ Gass, William H. Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999).
  5. ^ Rilke, Rainer Maria. "First Elegy" from Duino Elegies, line 1.
  6. ^ Rilke, Rainer Maria. "First Elegy" from Duino Elegies, line 6; "Second Elegy", line 1.
  7. ^ a b c d e Dash, Bibhudutt. "In the Matrix of the Divine: Approaches to Godhead in Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Tennyson’s In Memoriam" in Language in India Volume 11 (11 November 2011), 355-371.
  8. ^ Wellbery, David E.; Ryan, Judith; and Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. A New History of German Literature. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004), 723.
  9. ^ Freedman, Ralph. Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke. (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 320.
  10. ^ Gass, William H. Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 103.
  11. ^ Gass, William H. Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 225.
  12. ^ Leishman, J. B. and Spender, Stephen (translators). "Introduction" in Rainer Maria Rilke: Duino Elegies. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1939), 10.
  13. ^ Freedman, Ralph. Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke. (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 340.
  14. ^ Freedman, Ralph. Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke. (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 471
  15. ^ Freedman, Ralph. Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke. (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 474
  16. ^ Freedman, Ralph. Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke. (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 478.
  17. ^ Freedman, Ralph. Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke. (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 481.
  18. ^ Sword, Helen. Engendering Inspiration: Visionary Strategies in Rilke, Lawrence, and H.D. (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 68-70.
  19. ^ Polikoff, Daniel Joseph. In the Image of Orpheus Rilke: a Soul History. (Wilmette, Illinois: Chiron Publications, 2011), 585-588.
  20. ^ Rilke to Witold Hulewicz (13 November 1925): "The Elegies and The Sonnets support each other reciprocally, and I see it as an endless blessing that I, with the same breath, was able to fill both sails: the small, rust-colored sail of the sonnets and the great white canvas of the Elegies."
  21. ^ Polikoff, Daniel Joseph. In the Image of Orpheus Rilke: a Soul History. (Wilmette, Illinois: Chiron Publications, 2011), 588.
  22. ^ a b Rilke to Baladine Klossowska (9 February 1922) in Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to Merline 1919–1922 (St. Paul, Minnesota: Paragon House, 1989), 393.
  23. ^ a b Freedman, Ralph. Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke. (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 492.
  24. ^ a b Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salomé (11 February 1922) in Rilke, Rainer Maria and Andreas-Salomé, Lou. Briefwechsel (Insel, 1952), 464.
  25. ^ Freedman, Ralph. Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 515.
  26. ^ Rilke, Rainer Maria. "First Elegy" from Duino Elegies (1923), lines 4-5 translated by Mitchell, Stephen (Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1992)
  27. ^ Rilke, Briefe aus Muzot, 337.
  28. ^ Freedman, Ralph. Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke. (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 327.
  29. ^ Rilke, Briefe aus Muzot, 337.
  30. ^ Flemming, Albert Ernest (translator). Rainer Maria Rilke: Selected Poems. (New York:Routledge, 1990), 20-21.
  31. ^ Bruhn, Siglind. Musical Ekphrasis in Rilke's Marien-Leben (Rodopi, 2000), 28.
  32. ^ Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. “Immanent Transcendence in Rilke and Stevens” in The German Quarterly Volume 83, Issue 3 (Summer, 2010), 275-296.
  33. ^ Second Elegy, lines 37-38
  34. ^ Leishman, Spender, 96
  35. ^ Leishman, J. B., and Spender, Stephen, 91.
  36. ^ Leishman, Spender, 103.
  37. ^ Leishman, Spender, 97
  38. ^ Rilke, Later Poems, 230-231.
  39. ^ Leishman, Spender, 105.
  40. ^ Leishman, Spender, 103, 122.
  41. ^ Rilke, Briefe aus den Jahren 1914-1921, 125
  42. ^ Rilke to Nanny von Escher (22 December 1923).
  43. ^ Leishman, Spender, 102
  44. ^ Leishman, Spender, 102-103.
  45. ^ Rilke, Rainer Maria. Briefe aus den Jahren 1914-1921, 165.
  46. ^ Leishman, Spender, 14.
  47. ^ Hesse, Hermann, in the essay "Rainer Maria Rilke" (1928, 1927, 1933) in Part II of Hesse; Ziolkowski, Theodore (editor). My Belief: Essays on Life and Art (New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), 337-342.
  48. ^ Auden, W(ystan). H(ugh). "Sonnets from China", XIX, lines 8-14 (1936).
  49. ^ The Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Hunter

Further reading

  • Baron, Frank; Dick, Ernst S.; and Maurer, Warren R. (editors). Rainer Maria Rilke: The Alchemy of Alienation. (Regents Press of Kansas, 1980).
  • Gass, William H. Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999).
  • Graff, W. L. Rainer Maria Rilke: Creative Anguish of a Modern Poet. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956).
  • Guardini, Romano; (trans. by Knight, K.G.). Rilke's "Duino Elegies": An Interpretation (Henry Regnery, 1961).
  • Kleinbard, D. The Beginning of Terror: A Psychological Study of R.M. Rilke's Life and Work (1993).
  • Komar, Kathleen L. Transcending Angels: Rainer Maria Rilke's "Duino Elegies". (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1987).
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