Rainer Maria Rilke: The Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus
German Studies 395


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.