Rilke

The life of Rilke's work is in its words, and this book attends closely to the development of that life as it unfolds over Rilke's career. What is a poem, and how does it act upon us when we read? This is a question of the greatest interest to Rilke, who addresses it in several poems and for whom the experience of reading affords an interaction with the world, a recalibration of our ways of attending to it, which set it apart from other kinds of experience. Rilke'swork is often approached in periods—he is the author of the Neue Gedichte, or of Malte, or of the Duino Elegies, or of the Sonette an Orpheus—as if the different phases of his work had little to do with one another, but in fact it is a concentrated and evolving exploration of the possibilities ofpoetic language, a working of the life of words into precise and exacting forms in dialogue with the texture of the world. This book traces that trajectory in a series of close readings that do not neglect the…