Spring 2000. 4 credits. Wed. 2:30-4:25. In English translation. We will use a bilingual edition for the benefit of those who know German.
In 1922, the same year that saw the publication of Joyce’ Ulysses,
Eliot’s Waste Land, and Valéry’s Charmes,
Rilke’s
Duino Elegies, more than ten years in the making, were finally
completed
in a burst of creative energy that astonished even the poet.
One of Germany’s greatest lyrical poets along with Klopstock,
Goethe and Hoelderlin, Rilke attempts nothing
less
than the creation of a modern myth, a secular religiosity in which the
relationship between God and humans is replaced by one between man and
Angel, the latter, like Nietzsche’s Superman, but a projection of human
possibilities and aspirations. A member of a generation still numbed by
the destruction and social and political upheaval wrought by World War
I, Rilke defines the role of humans in terms of preservation and
conservation, of exuberant service to what is transitory, be they
natural
or cultural phenomena: "transient, they look to us for deliverance, us,
the most transient of all" (IX. Elegy).
We will discuss the ten elegies and fifty-five sonnets both as documents of their time and in the context of itellectual history.
In a letter to his friend Lou Andreas-Salomé of
February
11, 1922, he reports his emotional reaction to a project completed at
last:
I went out and stroked the little Muzot, which protected it and me and
finally granted it, like a large old animal.
W.H. Auden, like Stephen Spender and J.B. Leishman
an ardent admirer of Rilke's, and needing to remember the "other"
Germany
in the face of emerging barbarism, includes the reference in a sonnet
from
his cycle In War Time.
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 ...
There is an echo of the Duino Elegies' determined affirmation in the
last lines of his poem titled September 1, 1939
the day the Second World War broke out:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.