The ideal is to suggest the object”.

He was asked to resign his editorship, refused and so compelled the East German government publicly to force his resignation. Martin Opitz established rules for the "purity" of language, style, verse and rhyme. Alemannic). In ways reminiscent of Keats’ observations about feeling himself extinguished on entering a room full of people, Rilke would later recall how the city’s “grandeur, its near infinity” would annihilate his own sense of himself. These poems are winter psalms. The 10th of my sonnets – precisely that moment where the Orpheus/Eurydice separation occurred – was expanded into two poems, absorbing some details about a parked car on a hill and others, also focused on transience, from Dante’s Paradiso Book 16.

These high medieval heroic epics are written in rhymed strophes, not the alliterative verse of Germanic prehistory (for example, the Nibelungenlied).

Interestingly, Betz characterises Rilke’s methods of working on the novel, creating letters, notes, journal pages over a number of years, as “like sketches, studies of hands or torsos which the sculptor uses to prefigure a group work”. For a few months I copied Wordsworth. Mitchell again: “bounded by the church with its ready-made consolations: / clean and disenchanted and shut as a post-office on Sunday”. In retrospect, I seemed to be thinking, over a period of weeks, about the relation between self and other, the paying of attention to the transient world and the difficulty of maintaining such attention through the medium of language. Throughout his career the substance of much of his work is his vivid observation of the natural world, moving gradually towards a usually brief, free verse form, a withdrawal from the personal and a steadily darkening vision which comes to be dominated by elegy and lament.

Does this thing have any value? Will Stone (French original 1941; Pushkin Press, 2019). . Ich möcht’, o Freund, ihm nur im Tode gleichen; Doch höre nun die schönste der Geschichten!

German literature of the modern period is mostly in Standard German, but there are some currents of literature influenced to a greater or lesser degree by dialects (e.g. These are the sorts of strange happenstances that get thrown down in a writer’s notebook; happily, it was the dove image that stayed with me. Rilke is really communing with himself through the course of these poems, so he does tends to use the impersonal ‘you’. This is in part simply the required liberation from the way we use language to operate in (utilitarian) society though it’s also a shaking loose from the (again utilitarian) intentions and feelings of the quotidian. These represent the fecund variousness of the (natural) world to which we might be paying more attention. . does not concern him, he refuses it at the same moment, for his spirit is a realm which sustains only fog and what is feigned”. The story contains its own tragedy. Mitchell translates this as “that too-hasty profit snatched from impending loss”. We kept recurring to the question: why must Orpheus turn as he is leading Eurydice out of the Underworld? I’ll continue Peter Huchel’s life story in my next post. Der du von dem Himmel bist Barton tries a bit too hard with, “[this] is merely / easy credit with a looming payback date”. I have been busy preparing and working to propel into the world two new books of poetry.