The Poet's Dilemma: An Interpretation of Rilke's Second Duino Elegy

Extract

To scan The Duino Elegies once more, forty years after the poet's death, smothered as they are under an avalanche of interpretations, is a hazardous venture. To do so for a body of readers including many who know this poetry only through the blurring medium of translation seems questionable. To single out one of the Elegies, moreover, and present its poetic statement as embedded in the matrix of a much larger whole, within the space of a short paper, seems impossible. The hope that a group of serious students, perceptive to all the nuances of Rilke's mythopoeic language, will find something not only new but valid in my exposition, prompts me to this essay. For those readers who have command of the secondary literature I wish to state that I have pondered and thoroughly digested many commentaries, including the latest and most voluminous by Jacob Steiner.