First edition Translated and illustrated by Harry Behn. Very close to fine and bright illustrated colored cloth boards with bright attractive text thr oughout. Former owner's neat bookplate to inside cover.

Rainier Maria RILKE born, Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary, 4 Dec 1875: Austro-German poet who became internationally famous with such works as Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. ~~ At the outbreak of war in 1914, Rilke was in Munich, where he decided to remain, spending most of the war there. Early in the war he wrote a series of patriotic poems which he later renounced. In December 1915 he was called up for military service with the Austrian army at Vienna, but by June 1916 he had returned to civilian life. The social climate of these years proved inimical to his way of life and to his poetry and, by the time the war ended, he had come to feel almost completely paralyzed. He would have only one relatively productive phase: the fall of 1915, when, in addition to a series of new poems, he wrote the Fourth Duino Elegy. Rilke's Wartime Letters, 1914-1921 were published in 1940.


The ten Duino Elegies, along with The Sonnets to Orpheus, comprise the basis of Rilke's stature as one of the indisputably great poets of the Twentieth Century, perhaps the greatest. (T. S. Eliot, Osip Mandelstam, and Zbigniew Herbert, would be his only rivals for this distinction, if such a distinction were verifiable, which it is not.). The story of the creation of the Elegies has long since passed into legend: the first words came to Rilke on a violent sea wind, as he walked on the cliffs near Duino Castle (where Dante, it is said, composed portions of the Commedia) one morning in January 1912; by evening he had completed the first elegy, and, within a few days, the second elegy and written fragments of four others - the third, sixth, ninth, and tenth. And that was all. The third elegy was completed in Paris in 1913, and the fourth written in Munich in 1915. (It must be said that Rilke was writing many other poems during this period.) Then, after a hiatus of more than six years, the mensis mirabilis: Within the space of a month (between the 2nd and 23rd of February 1922), while living in solitude at the small Chateau de Muzot near Sierre, Switzerland, Rilke completed not only the ten elegies, but composed all fifty-nine of the Sonette an Orpheus as well. Like all genuinely inspired artists, Rilke is at times an unnerving presence, and one does not wish to collapse into fatuous mysticism. Nevertheless this feat - surely among the most spectacular in the history of the world - has something otherworldly about it; something divine, even archangelic. The elegies themselves are an inexhaustible, hermetic world, and supremely beautiful. In his admirable excursus to his recent translations, Reading Rilke, William Gass put it this way: "[Rilke's] work has taught me what real art ought to be, how it can matter to a life through its lifetime; how commitment can course like blood through the body of your words until the writing stirs, rises, opens its eyes; and finally, because his work allows me to measure what we call achievement: how tall his is, how small mine"