The poems, 859 lines long in total, were dedicated to the Princess upon their publication in 1923. As close readings, the interpretations confront the reader with the great themes of Rilke's oeuvre, in a cycle that moves gradually, but with growing confidence, to an acceptance of the limitations of human life and death. The Duino Elegies (German: Duineser Elegien) are a collection of ten elegies written by Rilke in 1912 while a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis (18551934) at Duino Castle, near Trieste on the Adriatic Sea. Commentary and text are interwoven in such a way that the reader is taken step by step into Rilke's world, while fresh English translations are provided for those unable to read the original German. The ten readings that make up this book, by members and former members of the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at Cambridge, seek both to come to terms with the problems of Rilke's language and imagery, and to bring out their poetic qualities. This hymnic verse draws creatively on a tradition of elegiac utterance in German while radically extending that language to the limits of its expressive powers in image and allusion. Rainer Maria Rilke is frequently acclaimed as the greatest poet writing in German in the twentieth century, and the Duino Elegies are his crowning achievement as a poet.
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