Beginnings
Beginnings
This chapter focuses on the early work up to Mir zur Feier (1899). Rilke’s beginnings were virtuosic but with a few exceptions fairly empty. This is the common view, and fundamentally it reflects the truth, but the picture has been distorted by the fact that Rilke did not collect or publish some of his most distinctive early work, especially the love poems written to Lou Andreas-Salomé (Dir zur Feier) and the so-called Christus-Visionen. By looking at these works more closely than is usually the case, this chapter also sheds a different light on some of the better known, but lesser works such as Mir zur Feier. Rilke’s poetics as they are expressed in his lecture Moderne Lyrik (1898) are also important here, together with his relationship to symbolism and decadence and the self-conscious attempt to make the difficulty and fragility of beginning into a poetically productive preoccupation.
Keywords: early work, beginnings, symbolism, decadence Nietzsche, George, virtuosity
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
