Rilke: The Life of the Work ISBN-13: 9780198813231

ISBN-13: 9780198813231

Binding: Hardcover

Author: Louth, Charlie

Release Date: 19-08-2020

Languages: English

Number Of Pages: 656

Package Dimensions: 9.5 x 9.4 x 1.7 inches

Details: The life of Rilkes work is in its words, and this book attends closely to the development of that life as it unfolds over Rilkes 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. Rilkes work 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 of poetic 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 lesser-known, uncollected poems and the poems in French, as well as Rilkes activity as a translator of Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Barrett Browning, Mallarmé, and Valéry, among many others. These encounters were part of Rilkes engagement with the world, his way of extending the reach of his language to get it ever closer to the ungraspable movements, the risk and promise, of life itself. One of his best-known poems ends with the words You must change your life, an injunction that can be seen to animate the whole of his work.