The Cambridge Companion to Rilke (original) (raw)
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HcP Ottawa, 2023
In part through critical biography, in part through a close reading of almost all of the poems Rilke wrote, including many poems from his Diaries, this large book challenges new ideas about what went into the making of Rilke over twenty years of production, from his early beginnings under the tutelage of Lou Salomé, right through, to his famous final works, the Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies. Volume 1 focuses largely on The Book of Hours; Volume 2 on The Book of Images, the two parts of New Poems, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and the first Elegies written while at Duino; Volume 3 on those all-crucial, self-transforming ten years beyond Duino that lead up to the Sonnets to Orpheus and Rilke’s eventual completion of the Elegies. Two major theses are put forward in this book, the first touching on Rilke’s well-known relationship to his former lover and mentor, Lou Salomé, who is understood to have been a far more problematic influence on him than we had supposed, the second touching on an equally crucial and at some point saving influence on Rilke from the literary sphere, which is shown to be that of the great visionary poet who went by the name of Novalis. Behind the grand story of Rilke’s poetic emergence lies the fundamental and long-standing reality of his repression by Lou and what that would sow, paradoxically, by way of a sublimated achievement as sublimely poignant as it is finally tragic. “My admiration for O’Meara’s close textual reading and analytical abilities in this Rilke text knows no bounds.” { Gary Geddes, editor of "20th-Century Poetry and Poetics", Oxford University Press, and author of "Active Trading: Selected Poems 1970-1995." } Visit the author's website at johnomeara.squarespace.com
“Superabundant Being”: Disambiguating Rilke and Heidegger
Modern Theology, 2018
Rilke's impact on the generation of writers reshaping philosophy and theology during the interwar years is arguably without parallel. Within this constellation, the case of Heidegger as a reader of Rilke presents unique challenges. For Rilke's poetry neither quite allows for a wholly appropriative reading such as, for better or worse, Heidegger accords Hölderlin's oeuvre; nor can Heidegger quite bring himself to subject Rilke's poetry to critical appraisal. Instead, Heidegger's analysis of Dasein as worked out in Part I of Being and Time (1927) and in his lectures on The Basic Concepts of Metaphysics (1929) seems haunted by an intellectual and expressive debt to Rilke that he can neither acknowledge nor fully resolve. For to do so would be to confront a possibility of human finitude, so luminously traced in Rilke's Duino Elegies (1922), still defined by moments of transcendence-moments that can be captured in the fleeting plenitude of poetic intuition (Anschauung) and lyric image (Bild). Whereas von Balthasar, in volume 3 of his Apokalypse der deutschen Seele (1939), reads Rilke as fundamentally embracing Heidegger's notion of strictly immanent and finite Dasein, I argue that the oeuvre of the later Rilke, without being reclaimed for a metaphysical, let alone religious position, nevertheless is shaped, both intellectually and expressively, by insistent, if enigmatic, moments of transcendence. I With the possible exception of Hölderlin, no German poet has had greater resonance in twentieth-century intellectual culture than Rilke. The list of philosophers and theologians responding to his poetry includes Erich Przywara, Romano Guardini, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Maurice Blanchot and, of course, Martin Heidegger. Of those expressly and for the most part affirmatively responding to Rilke, some (e.g., Przywara) simply quote his poetry at length and almost without commentary, seemingly taking Rilke's late poetry, and the Duino Elegies in particular, as a canonical expression of post-World War I Europe's spiritual and intellectual destitution. 1 Others, Heidegger, Guardini, and von Balthasar above all, offer more searching, if notably divergent, interpretations of Rilke. In von Balthasar's wide-ranging exploration of eschatological motifs in European modernity (Apokalypse der deutschen Seele, 1937-1939), 1 In a 1936 collection of essays, Przywara situates Rilke in a matrix of voices that include St. Ignatius,
" Verwandt-verwandelt": Nietzsche's Presence in Rilke
2006
Rilke’s relationship to Nietzsche is still nowhere near fully explored. This is due to the poet’s peculiar silence regarding the inescapably influential philosopher, as well as to a frequently acknowledged lack of evidence regarding that influence, the existence of which remains heatedly debated and, at best, speculatively assumed within scholarship. The recent discovery, however, of two copies of Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra amongst Rilke’s possessions has changed the status quo, as both contain reading traces identified as Rilke’s in one case, and (most probably) Lou Andreas-Salomé’s in the other. This unprecedented find not only proves for the first time Rilke’s familiarity with that book, but also makes visible which particular Nietzschean themes were of special interest to the poet. It is this study’s aim to trace Nietzsche’s presence, rendered tangible by those themes, in Rilke’s work and enquire whether, where and how he transformed it poetically. In the first part, potential arguments against this objective are addressed. An investigation of the legitimacy of a comparison of a Dichter and a Denker is followed by a thorough record of the state of research on ‘Rilke and Nietzsche’ so far, whilst an alternative methodological approach, a ‘reader-response-poetics’ (rather than -theory) drawing on both Nietzsche and Rilke themselves, is offered. Then, following the documentation of the new findings, the resulting scholarly desiderata this study sets out to meet are defined. The second part completes the theoretical framework by uniting all remaining evidence such as Rilke’s own statements and those of his contemporaries regarding his reading of Nietzsche. The role of Lou Andreas-Salomé in both men’s lives, along with Rilke’s ‘Marginalien zu Nietzsche’ found in her estate, will also be discussed. Moreover, Zarathustra is introduced in two chapters, taking into account the circumstances of both Nietzsche’s writing, and Rilke’s reading, of it. The third and last part – structured in analogy to the first three Zarathustra books – consists of in-depth textual analysis of representative Nietzsche passages marked by Rilke, along with interpretations of Rilkean works found to be relevant in their respective contexts. This process, during which the main topics Rilke apparently found most arresting in Nietzsche crystallized almost automatically, has ultimately also brought to light the continuity of Rilke’s reception of Nietzsche throughout his literary career.
A String, Stretched over Resonances: Rilke, reciprocity, reality (beyond theory)
Independent study, 2024
My senior thesis as an undergraduate at Princeton University was entitled: The Work of Art: Aesthetics, Poetics and Ethics in Paul Valéry and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Writings on Visual Art. The first chapters talked about what the title says, and the final chapter looked closely at one poem from each poet, showing how their poetry embodies the theory and convictions expressed in their essays. The poem from Rilke was “Am Rande der Nacht” (On the Border of Night). In Rilke’s poem, the speaker assumes a role as co-creator of the world, and we see also in his Book of Hours (Das Stundenbuch), composed during the same time period as “Am Rande Der Nacht”, that participation in the web of all things is being in relationship with what he calls God. This paper calls into question theoretical frameworks that presume a separation between humans and their surrounding environment, and demonstrates Rilke's alignment with indigenous ontologies of interconnection and reciprocity.
Rilke's Semiotic Potential: Iconicity and Performance
American Journal of Semiotics 18, 2006
This article demonstrates how a new reading of Rilke's poetry can provide a basis for comparing and contrasting the aesthetic approach to text to art and the language-based approach that foregrounds the role of metaphor ad materiality in language production. Lessing's 'Laocoon' is discussed in terms of an implied contrast between painting and poetry which, however, acquires a different valence when the Fifth Elegy of Rilke's 'Duino Elegies' suggests that poetry itself functions as a 'metaphorical hypoicon' allowing for shared meanings. My concluding remarks emphasize the importance of the performing self to a complete understanding of Rilke's semiotic potential.