2020/06/24 by Charlie Louth · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #German Literature and Culture Studies #Elegy #Literature #Meaning (existential) #Poetry #Art #Lament #Reading (process) #Focus (optics) #Magnum opus #Philosophy #Linguistics #Epistemology #Physics
paper · doi:10.1093/oso/9780198813231.003.0009
openalex publication_date 2020/06/24 · openalex created_date 2022/05/12 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Rilke regarded the <italic>Elegies</italic> as his <italic>magnum opus</italic>, and this and criticism’s readiness to adopt his judgement have not only obstructed appreciation of Rilke’s other work but made it hard to read the <italic>Elegies</italic> themselves. We need to learn to read them again, which to an extent means reading them against the grain. It is as a precarious structure, rather than as a monumental one, that they have their meaning. This chapter offers a reading of each elegy in turn, attending to the rhythms, movements, and poetic logic of the poems—in short, the language out of which they are made—more than to their ‘argument’. A focus and starting-point is the elegy itself: elegy as <italic>classical form</italic> points to art as what shapes life and attempts to give it meaning; elegy as <italic>lament</italic> points to life as what is resistant to art and in its transience always escapes its structures.