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5 books match the query 'Rainer Maria Rilke'

cover of Dear Friend: Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker

Dear Friend

Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker

Eric Torgersen

Northwestern University Press, 2000

Waterlings are the mysterious beings at the center of Veno Taufer's collection of poems. Employing his trademark concise language with hypercondensed imagery and rhythmic drive, Taufer presents a world that at once invokes shamanistic rituals and children's games and riddles. Lyric poetry has long been the most celebrated branch of literature in Slovenia, and Taufer is considered one of the strongest poets of his generation.
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cover of Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke

Life of a Poet

Rainer Maria Rilke

Ralph Freedman

Northwestern University Press, 1998

In this highly praised and extraordinary biography, Ralph Freedman traces Rilke's luminous career by weaving together detailed accounts of pivotal and formative episodes from the poet's restless life with a close, intimate reading of the verse and prose that refract them. This lively and engrossing biography offers much of interest to Rilke's growing body of followers.
 
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cover of Rainer Maria Rilke: Das Marien-Leben

Rainer Maria Rilke

Das Marien-Leben

Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Christopher Anderson

Bridwell Press, 2025

Rainer Maria Rilke’s fifteen-part poetic cycle Das Marien-Leben stands as his most eloquent meditation on Mary, the mother of Jesus, whose name he shares. Rilke composed these verses in 1912, and ten years later, Paul Hindemith chose to heighten their rhetoric in an expansive song cycle for soprano and piano, the music revised in 1948. The present edition offers a fresh translation of the texts by Christopher Anderson alongside the sensitive artwork of Nishiki Sugawara-Beda, who has fashioned her concept particularly around Hindemith’s music. Supporting essays by translator and artist further situate the work in historical and contemporary contexts. Here is a poetic treasure, less known but no less significant in Rilke’s oeuvre, made accessible to English readers in a unique frame.
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cover of Rainer Maria Rilke: The Ring of Forms

Rainer Maria Rilke

The Ring of Forms

Frank Wood

University of Minnesota Press, 1958

Rainer Maria Rilke was first published in 1958. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke died in 1926, and interest in his poetry has been mounting ever since. The winds of fashion, taste, or personal bias have shifted several times to affect his audience of readers. There have been, according to previous Rilke criticism, not one but many Rilkes. Thus the critics have pointed to the "early Rilke" and the "late Rilke," to the Prague poet, the Paris poet, and the Muzot poet.

Now, in a fresh approach yet one which takes full cognizance of the varying viewpoints and conflicting purposes of earlier criticism, Professor Wood carefully examines Rilke's entire poetic output. The major concern here is with the poetry itself rather than with the biographical, psychological, or philosophical questions which have dominated most previous criticism.

Through a close textual analysis of the poems, Professor Wood demonstrates that the whole body of Rilke's writing, from beginning to end, is thoroughly interrelated and interdependent. As he points out, many more published materials, both posthumous verse and correspondence, are available now than in the earlier periods of Rilke's fame, a situation which adds significance to this new evaluation.

In addition to analyzing Rilke's own poetry, Professor Wood shows the links between Rilke and such contemporary poets and writers as Gide, Proust, T.S. Eliot, and Yeats.

The excerpts quoted from Rilke's poetry are given both in the original German text and in standard English translation.

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cover of The Sonnets of Rainer Maria Rilke

The Sonnets of Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke

St. Augustine's Press, 2021

Romano Guardini described Rainer Maria Rilke as the “poet who had things of such importance to say about the end of our own age [and] was also a prophet of things to come.” The complexity of Rilke is, then, “highly relevant to modern Man.” Decades after Guardini’s assessment, the reader who rediscovers Rilke will find a depth of mind and soul that display a profundity the post-modern reader only thinks he possesses. 

In an expanded collection of Rilke’s sonnets, Rick Anthony Furtak not only makes this lyrical masterpiece accessible to the English reader, but he proves himself a master of sorts as well. His introduction that elaborates on Rilke’s marriage of vision and voice, intention and enigma, haunted companionship and abandonment is a stand-alone marvel for the reader. Furtak’s praised translation of Sonnets to Orpheus (University of Chicago Press, 2008) is surpassed in this much broader collection of verse that also includes the original German text. It is Furtak’s great achievement that Rilke resonates with the contemporary reader, who uncertain and searching wants to believe that the vision of existence can mirror much more than his own consciousness. In his feat of rendering Rilke in English, contextualizing the philosophical meanings of verse, and presenting literary romanticism, Furtak provides a formidable contribution to the vindication of true poetic voice.
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