'The Poet Alone Unites the World': The Poetics of Praise in Rainer Maria Rilke's The Duino Elegies
The poems Rilke wrote during the last years of his life are often read as a dark musing on the unravelling of culture during the years of the Great War and the decade that followed. There is an elegiac quality to many of them, but in the midst of this they give voice to what I call a poetics of prai...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
[2015]
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| In: |
Literature and theology
Year: 2015, Volume: 29, Issue: 4, Pages: 415-430 |
| RelBib Classification: | CD Christianity and Culture KAJ Church history 1914-; recent history NBC Doctrine of God VA Philosophy |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Resolving-System) Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | The poems Rilke wrote during the last years of his life are often read as a dark musing on the unravelling of culture during the years of the Great War and the decade that followed. There is an elegiac quality to many of them, but in the midst of this they give voice to what I call a poetics of praise-often explicit, as in the Sonnets , but also substantially present, as in the Elegies . It is this dimension of the latter that this article explores, considering how Rilke's notion of the poet's vocation influenced these poems in particular. Here, his praise is not directed toward some transcendent deity but rather toward the world and all that is 'sayable' about it. His work as a poet, as he had come to understand it, was to affirm a unity in this world, in the midst of the apparent fragmentation and loss that seemed an overwhelming pressure during this period. Against Wittgenstein's claim, published within a year of the Elegies , that 'the sense of the world must lie beyond the world', Rilke insisted that this 'sense' or meaning could only rest in the world-or in the manner in which world in/forms us, an insight captured in his notion of 'Weltinnenraum' ('world/inner/space'). The poet's purpose, then, is to bear witness to this unity, and, in a sense, 'unify' the world through the posture of praise by which we take the visible world into our consciousness and come to recognise an essential inner unity amid the very real brokenness that marks its 'outer' form. |
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| ISSN: | 1477-4623 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Literature and theology
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/litthe/frv045 |
