The Imaginative Ecology of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus

Rilke’s poetry issues a critique of modern alienation from the natural world and is held in philosophical and ecocritical interpretations to effect an alternative revealing of nature. This essay investigates nature in Rilke’s writings by tracing its relation to poetic imagination and considers in that light the prospects of a Rilkean vision of nature for literary ecocriticism. Nature in Rilke’s work, it is argued, does not appear primarily as a prelinguistic given to be salvaged, but must be both retrieved and constituted through a productive imaginative consciousness, a prospect lyrically thematized in The Sonnets to Orpheus. The play between revelation of nature and its imaginative generation underlies the ecological import of Rilke’s poetry, despite the risk it poses to the idea of privileged poetical access to nature itself and its celebration in both phenomenological accounts of poetic revealing and traditional literary ecocriticism.

Love in Paramyth

This essay discusses the Orpheus myth, its sources, and its meaning as well as its role in art and literature, in the context of current theories of myth. In particular, it considers Rilke’s reception of Orpheus in The Sonnets to Orpheus as well as in his early narrative poem from 1904 to 1905, “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes,” the only poem that bears Orpheus in its title. The focus of the interpretation is on Rilke’s revision of myth: the poet makes use of the Orpheus myth to exemplify his distinctive conception of love. Special attention is given to how the representation of Eurydice in “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes” already embodies Rilke’s view of unpossessive love that becomes central in his later works.

Rilke on Formally Disclosing the Meaning of Things

Rilke claims that the poet’s task is to reveal the qualitative valences of existence, thus enabling his readers to become emotionally aware of its meaning—in spite of all that might threaten our sense that life is significant and worth living. Insofar as Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus enact this mode of vision, they embody an antinihilistic way of seeing. One who does not view the world in this manner must remain unaware of its axiologically rich features, because poetic vision brings tangible value to light for both poet and reader. This chapter discusses how this outlook is articulated in the musical aspects of the Sonnets—which heighten the affective impact of Rilke’s words, and often register powerfully felt shocks of recognition. The formal patterns of Rilke’s sonnets bring intense feeling and insight to voice: furthermore, the poet’s formal techniques contribute to his way of articulating a poetic vision of the world.

Beyond Existentialism

This essay illustrates the limitations of predominant existentialist readings of death, mortality, and authenticity in Rilke and the presence of spiritual and esoteric dimensions that also need to be taken into account. Rilke’s distinctive conception of the unity of the realm of the living and the realm of the dead involves a marriage of existentialist and spiritual perspectives, and is part and parcel of his monistic conception of the unity of the visible and the invisible. The Sonnets to Orpheus build on Rilke’s treatment of these themes in his earlier major works (the New Poems, Malte, Duino Elegies). Rilke draws on the legend of Orpheus entering the realm of the dead (in his attempt to bring back Eurydice) through the power of his poetry/music, in order to articulate the role of poetry in facilitating an expanded awareness of the ultimate unity of existence.

On Inwardness and Place in Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus

Rilke’s poetry can be read, under the influence of Heidegger, as entangled in the philosophy of subjectivity inaugurated by Descartes and brought to completion in the writings of Nietzsche, and so, by implication, belonging to a tradition to be overcome. The Sonnets occasionally appeal to human subjectivity as a creative source of the world’s being and meaning, but they also contest modern assumptions about subjectivity, and in ways that invite comparison with Heidegger’s own ambition to locate sources of significance beyond the Cartesian subject. This becomes especially palpable when one focuses on Rilke’s use of the language of space and place. The present chapter explores Rilke’s views on interiority and romantic inwardness and argues, against the grain of Heidegger’s interpretation, that the Sonnets develop a set of topological insights into the nonsubjective sources or places of human significance and the roots of an affirmative way of inhabiting the world.

Introduction

This coauthored introduction to the volume Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus”: Philosophical and Critical Perspectives discusses the philosophical character and reception of Rilke’s poetry and both the importance and the challenges of interpreting Rilke’s work philosophically. A claim is made for the general significance of dialogue between poetry and philosophy and for the distinctive way in which Rilke’s poetry addresses philosophical concerns. This introduction also situates The Sonnets to Orpheus—the focus of the volume—in the context of Rilke’s oeuvre (with special attention to their connections to the Duino Elegies), discusses their scholarly reception, and provides a synopsis of the essays featured in the volume and of how they unite philosophical, critical, and poetic perspectives.

The Feminine in Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus

Women play a unique role in Rilke’s work. They are exemplary lovers—usually unrequited—or extraordinarily protective mothers or creative inspirations. The Sonnets to Orpheus feature a number of crucial women both historical and mythical. This essay investigates the significance of women and the feminine more generally in the Sonnets. For Rilke, women embody the nonvisible and capture the realm beyond the merely physical. This feminine principle has the capacity to bring into being that which is potential but not yet realized—just as the poet does in the creation of the poem. Rilke sees the feminine as creatively potent but at the cost of personal fulfillment. The feminine thus embodies for Rilke a philosophy of productive deprivation that presents challenges for a feminist view but also privileges the feminine. Only by participating in that feminine principle can the poet gain access to the most crucial world beyond the tangible.

The Pozzo Sonnet

Rilke is often cited as the first major modern poet to address and in some part orientate his poetry toward the animal. Reading II.11 of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus and concerned by the manner in which it condones the killing of doves, this essay suggests a wound within Rilke’s work occasioned by a radical tension between his allegiance to poetry per se and his concern for animals. Arguing that this sonnet is perhaps the most Orphic of the Sonnets, it locates Rilke’s use of the Orpheus myth within a broader necrologocentricity in twentieth-century thought. It asks whether this preoccupation with death may, as an excuse wound, serve to mask a deeper wound that may be occasioned by our suppression, relegation, and exploitation of animals. In order to free poetry to address this wound some ancient bonds within us may need to be broken or reconfigured, including our treasured bond with Orpheus.

The Modernism of The Sonnets to Orpheus

Although Rilke does not fit neatly within any of the movements that made up European modernism, he nonetheless takes up the problems they identified and articulated: problems of the human relation to the world; the meaning of that world and the things in it; the potential loss of meaning in the face of various modes of alienation; the roots of alienation in objectifying modes of thought or the monumental shifts occasioned by technological advances; and the confrontation with human mortality and finitude in the absence of meaning-granting institutions. This essay argues that Rilke’s engagement with the visual arts offers some his most direct statements of how aesthetic making responds to these problems prior to demonstrating that The Sonnets to Orpheus are Rilke’s poetic working-through of how both the themes and specific language-use of poetry might help salvage world relations threatened by a stance of technological mastery and reduction to use value.