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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...