As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.

We know from accounts of Rilke’s life that his stay in Rodin’s workshops taught him how modern sculpture had advanced to the genre of the autonomous torso. The poet’s view of the mutilated body thus...

It is clear enough that not every something can be elevated to the rank of a thing – otherwise everything and everyone would be speaking once more, and the chatter would spread from humans to...

She who reconciles the ill-matched threadsOf her life, and weaves them gratefullyInto a single cloth – It’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hallAnd clears it for a different celebration.

Rilke wrote: ‘These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.

You, God, who live next door–If at times, through the long night, I trouble youwith my urgent knocking–this is why: I hear you breathe so seldom.I know you’re all alone in that room. If you...

The aesthetic construct, and nothing else, has taught us to expose ourselves to a non-enslaving experience of rank differences. The work of art is even allowed to ‘tell’ us, those who have run away from...

How they are all about, these gentlemenIn chamberlains’ apparel, stocked and laced,Like night around their order’s star and gemAnd growing ever darker, stony-faced,And these, their ladies, fragile, wan, but proppedHigh by their bodice, one hand...

This gesture is one of the motifs of modernity’s turn against the principle of imitating nature, that is to say, imitating predefined morphological expectations. It is still capable of perceiving message-totalities and autonomous thing-signals when...

Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

In his field, and with his means, Rilke carries out an operation that one could philosophically describe as the ‘transformation of being into message’ (more commonly, ‘linguistic turn’). ‘Being that can be be understood is...

Destiny itself is like a wonderful wide tapestry in which every thread is guided by an unspeakable tender hand, placed beside another thread and held and carried by a hundred others.

In the midst of the ubiquitous dealings with prostituted signs, the thing-poem was capable of opening up the prospect of returning to credible experiences of meaning. It did this by tying language to the gold...

Whoever you are, go out into the evening,leaving your room, of which you know every bit;your house is the last before the infinite,whoever you are.

As we know, Rilke, under the influence of Auguste Rodin, whom he had assisted between 1905 and 1906 in Meudon as a private secretary, turned away from the art nouveau-like, sensitized-atmospheric poetic approach of his...

Most days I live awed by the world we have still, rather than mourning the worlds we have lost. The bandit mask of a cedar waxwing on a bare branch a few feet away; the...

The reason for the existence of the perfection conjured up in these fourteen lines is that it possesses … the authorization to form a message that appeals from within itself. This power of appeal is...

…until summer becomes ein Zimmer in einem Traum — a room in a dream.

What the poet has to say to the torso of the supposed Apollo, however, is more than a note on an excursion to the antiquities collection. The author’s point is not that the thing depicts...