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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 10 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, which is understood to have been far more problematic 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."--
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