All Formats & Editions

Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies are one of the great literary masterpieces of the twentieth century. Begun in 1912 while the poet was a guest at Duino Castle on the Adriatic Sea and completed in a final bout of feverish inspiration in 1922, the ten elegies survey the mysteries... Read Full Overview

The first-ever English translation of Rilke's landmark poetry cycle, by Vita and Edward Sackville-West ­- reissued for the first time in 90 years In 1931, Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press published a small run of a beautiful edition of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies... Read Full Overview

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders? and even if one of them pressed me suddenly to his heart: I'd be consumed in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we can just barely endure, and we stand in awe of it... Read Full Overview

We have a marvelous, almost legendary, image of the circumstances in which the composition of this great poem began. Rilke was staying at a castle (Duino) on the sea near Trieste. One morning he walked out on the battlements and climbed down to where the rocks dropped sharply... Read Full Overview

Long dissatisfied with the highly romatical and often obscure translations in English of Rilke's great poem cycle, brother and sister Willam and Mary Crichton determined to work toward a translation that would be as straightforward and transparent, yet as lyrically beautiful... Read Full Overview

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is one of Germany's major Modernist poets, notable for the lyric intensity of his work. He considered the Duino Elegies - a cycle of ten poems written in inspirational bursts between 1912 and 1922 - to be his major achievement. The restless movement... Read Full Overview

Poetry. Translated from the German by Gary Miranda. Begun in 1912, interrupted by the Great War, and completed early in 1922, the ten meditations on love and death in Rilke's DUINO ELEGIES are perhaps the twentieth century's most sustained outpouring of lyricism. Abstract, allusive,... Read Full Overview

A new translation of Rilke's great work with close readings of each of the ten elegies elucidating how their poetic attributes constitute their meaning.

Rainer Maria Rilke, one of Germany's greatest poets, began this work in 1912, at the castle of Duino near Trieste. It took him a decade to complete these meditations on love, death, God, and life's meaning, and he regarded them as his greatest achievement. Innovative and enigmatic,... Read Full Overview

The Duino Elegies (German: Duineser Elegien) are a collection of ten elegies written by the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). Rilke, who is "widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets," began writing the elegies in 1912... Read Full Overview

Begun in 1912 at the castle of Duino near Trieste, these ten Elegies were finally completed, after a decade of sporadic and protracted creation, at the Ch?teau Muzot in the Swiss Valais. Rilke considered them his greatest achievement, and, as MacIntyre suggests, they are "among... Read Full Overview

Named after the Castle of Duino on a rocky headland of the Adriatic, the Duino Elegies speak in a voice that is both intimate and majestic on the mysteries of human life and our attempt, in the words of the translator, to use our self-consciousness to some advantage: to transcend,... Read Full Overview

Rilke considered the Elegies his greatest achievement. Begun in 1912 at the castle of Duino near Trieste, these ten Elegies were finally completed after a decade of sporadic and protracted creation, in the winter of 1922. They are part of the same creative vein from which... Read Full Overview

Duineser Elegien ist der Titel einer Sammlung von zehn Elegien des Dichters Rainer Maria Rilke. Ihr Name leitet sich vom Schloss Duino bei Triest ab, wo Rilke 1912 Gast der Gr fin Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe war. Dort entstand die erste Elegie. Elegien changieren zwischen... Read Full Overview

The Duino Elegies are the culmination of the development of Rilke's poetry. A summary of his spiritual troubles, perhaps no volume of poems in a European language has made so dramatic and sustained an impact on English-speaking readers in this century.