RILKE IN THE MAKING:
A COMPREHENSIVE STUDY OF HIS LIFE AND WORK ,
incorporating Volumes 1, 2, & 3,
has now appeared
(Fall, 2023)
See, for downloading,
or, alternatively,
*Also available at a University Library near you, or through the InterLibrary University Loan system. *
***
Volume One
A POET'S FALL FROM GRACE (1897-1905)
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Volume Two
MEASURING LIMITS (THE DUINO MOMENT) (1905-1914)
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Volume Three
COMING TO COMPLETION (1914-1926)
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In part through critical biography, in part through a close reading of
almost all of the poems Rilke wrote, including many poems from
his Diaries, this large book challenges new ideas about what went
into the making of Rilke over twenty years of production, from his
early beginnings under the tutelage of Lou Salomé, right through, to
his famous final works, the Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies.
Volume 1 focuses largely on The Book of Hours; Volume 2 on The Book
of Images, the two parts of New Poems, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids
Brigge, and the first Elegies written while at Duino; Volume 3 on those
all-crucial, self-transforming ten years beyond Duino that lead up to
the Sonnets to Orpheus and Rilke’s eventual completion of the Elegies.
Two major theses are put forward in this book, the first touching
on Rilke’s well-known relationship to his former lover and mentor,
Lou Salomé, who is understood to have been a far more problematic
influence on him than we had supposed, the second touching on an
equally crucial and at some point saving influence on Rilke from the
literary sphere, which is shown to be that of the great visionary poet
who went by the name of Novalis. Behind the grand story of Rilke’s
poetic emergence lies the fundamental and long-standing reality of his
repression by Lou and what that would sow, paradoxically, by way of
a sublimated achievement as sublimely poignant as it is finally tragic.
“My admiration for O’Meara’s close textual reading and analytical abilities in this Rilke text knows no bounds.”
{ Gary Geddes, editor of 20th-Century Poetry and Poetics, Oxford University Press, and author of Active Trading: Selected Poems 1970-1995. }