Rilke: The Life of the Work

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is the most important modernist poet in German and one of the most widely-read poets in the world. This book is the first full-length study of Rilke written in English for many years, and one of the few to address the breadth of his work, including the translations and the late poems written in French. It is based on close readings which attend to the ways in which the poems open up our apprehension of the world. The life of the poems is in those moments where reading reveals our lives to us in ways which give us the potential to lead them differently. What happens when we read a Rilke poem? How does it act upon us? This book pursues these questions via readings of all of Rilke’s major works and many of the less familiar ones. The texture of the poems, their actual wording, is always the focus of attention, but translations of all quotations are provided.