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What to Say? #1:
Rilke's
Sonnets to Orpheus
In my "Recent Reading" box at the top left of my home page you will see
a list of the books that I've read recently. These are books I've been
meaning to write about, but sometimes they sit there for weeks because I
just don't know what to say.
I think that the problem has been my idea that the quality of what I
write must be, in some way, commensurate with the quality of the book
I'm writing about. In many cases this is impossible, and with
others this error has led to the writing of a lot of shitty criticism.
Rilke's
Sonnets to Orpheus and his
Duino Elegies are, except for some of the
greatest of the tragedies, the greatest poems I know of. Each book is a
coherent whole made up of many distinct, vivid parts, and the density of
the writing is unmatched.
When I was young I preferred poetry which I though of
as "natural", but a lot of those poems now seem flat and easy. I prefer
instead poets like Nerval, Rilke, and Valery who write artificially and
use obscure and unnatural symbols. The real lives of the people of
today, including my own, do not appeal to me at all as a poetic
subject.
There are many disadvantages to growing old, but
reading Rilke is one of the advantages.
A sketch map of Rilke's
"Sonnette an Orpheus":
1500 words for someone who
knows some German and wants to give Rilke a try
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I am emersonj at gmail dot com.
Original materials copyright John J
Emerson
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