Poetry. Rainer Maria Rilke, along with Yeats, Mandelstam, and Pessoa, is regarded as one of the great European poets of his century, and by many as the outstanding German poet between Holderlin and Celan. DUINO ELEGIES is Rilke's masterpiece. This cycle of poems, language grasped at its speech-seed, was composed in a three-week blaze of creative energy in 1922, the annus mirabilis which saw the first publication of The Wasteland, Ulysses, and Pound's early Cantos. Rilke, the Santa Claus of loneliness, in Auden's cheeky phrase, said that the elegies were dictated to him, entrusted to him. Of all English versions of Rilke's elegaic symphony, these by the German scholar and poet Patrick Bridgwater may well incarnate the deepest reconciliation of that necessarily warring menage a trois: beauty, truth, and fidelity.

Author City: Prague AST

Rainer Maria Rilke (also Rainer Maria von Rilke) (4 December 1875 - 29 December 1926) is considered one of the German language's greatest 20th century poets. His haunting images 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. He wrote in both verse and a highly lyrical prose. His two most famous verse sequences are the Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies; his two most famous prose works are the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. He also wrote more than 400 poems in French, dedicated to his homeland of choice, the canton of Valais in Switzerland.