1. Rainer Maria Rilke
Duino Elegies

2. The Enigma
The mysteries of the universe are forever ambiguous, but the religious activity of art, and the power of human creativity, can refashion the world.

3. Influences: Leo Tolstoy’s Mysticism

4. Influence: Boris Pasternak’s Pastoralism

5. Influences: Auguste Rodin’s “The Kiss”
“In Rodin he recognizes the workmanlike dedication to the demands of one’s craft, an intense concentration on visible, tangible objects, and, above all, a belief in art as an essentially religious activity.” (2715)

6. Duino Castle

7. Chateau de Muzot

8. Archaic Torso of Apollo “You must change your life.”
His “thing-poems” emphasize material description of the absolute otherness of ancient art objects, detached from history, and merely as phenomena, “things in themselves” that are “supremely alive.” (2715)

9. The Panther
Circling “like a ritual dance around a center/ in which a mighty will stands paralyzed….”

10. The Swan “…suffused with human emotions…that cannot be reduced to a one meaning.

11. Spanish Dancer
The dancer’s dress “becomes a furnace/ from which, like startled rattlesnakes, the long/ naked arms uncoil, aroused, and clicking.”

12. He sought to praise this world, and “…the Angel of absolute reality, whose self contained perfection is terrifyingly separate from mortal concerns…and the essential unity of life and death….” (2716)

13. Ultimately…
“Rilke is celebrating the power of human creativity to refashion the world in its own image. The poet observes reality and creates it in a new form, a new being.” (2717)