The Elegiac Mode in Milton and Rilke: Reflections on Death

By Dan Latimer

This study examines the elegiac tradition as a succession of poetic responses to the problem posed to man by death and such consequent dilemmas as divine injustice, vitiated nature, immortality, and esthetic memory. Within this tradition, Milton and Rilke represent antithetical positions, the former, uranian poet cancelling tragic antinomies through transcendence of nature, the latter, tellurian poet vindicating nature and death by reviving an almost matriarchal consciousness excluding both tragic individualism and transcendence.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 3261020393
• ISBN13: 9783261020390
• Release Date: December 1977
• Publisher: Peter Lang Group Ag, International Academic P
• Length: 56 Pages