Rilke's Late Poetry: Duino Elegies, The Sonnets to Orpheus and Selected Last Poems

by Rainer Maria Rilke, Graham Good

The late poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is one of the summits of European poetry in the twentieth century. Completed in 1922, as were T S Eliot's The Waste Land and James Joyce's Ulysses, Duino Elegies ranks with them as a classic of literary Modernism, and as an inquiry into the spiritual crisis of modernity. The ten long poems grapple with the issue of how the human condition and the role of art have altered in the modern era, with the decline of religion and the acceleration of technology.1922 also saw the unexpected birth and completion of a new work, The Sonnets to Orpheus, a cycle of 55 sonnets giving lyrical expression to the philosophical insights gained in the Elegies. This is dedicated to Orpheus, the mythic singer and lyre player, who becomes a symbol for Rilke of the acceptance of transience in life and transformation in art. The third part of the late poetry consists of the less known brief lyrics. Rilke wrote in the five years prior to his death in December 1926. These last poems constitute a kind of third testament, along with the Elegies and Sonnets. Graham Good's edition is the first to combine translations of all three into a single volume. original within fluid and readable English verse, while the introduction and detailed commentary elucidate the contexts, themes and allusions to help make Rilke's late poetry accessible to contemporary poetry lovers and spiritual seekers.

Genres: Poetry

186 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2006

About the author

A mystic lyricism and precise imagery often marked verse of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose collections profoundly influenced 20th-century German literature and include The Book of Hours (1905) and The Duino Elegies (1923).

People consider him of the greatest 20th century users of the language.

His haunting images tend to focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety — themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.

His two most famous sequences include the Sonnets to Orpheus , and his most famous prose works include the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge .

He also wrote more than four hundred poems in French, dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland, his homeland of choice.

Reviews

[tessa · Rating 3 out of 5]

My favorite were the selected last poems at the end of the book! So pretty. I think that Rilke is just a genius with words.

[Abrandon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book alot in high school, had it copied from a library book and kept in my journal which I carried everywhere.

[Al Maki]

So far only the Duino Elegies. It's a translation into modern English which I like because it doesn't make Rilke seem old-fashioned as many of the more literal ones do. It is more immediate.