Rilke’s evocative prose allowed Kiefer to fully appreciate the work of the French sculptor, whose naturalistic touch and tendency toward the monumental would make him one of Kiefer’s most enduring sources of inspiration. In the 1960s, a young Anselm Kiefer picked up a copy of Rilke’s Rodin monograph, his first encounter with both of their work. Originally conceived seven years prior for the Monument to Victor Hugo-in which the muse, perched above the French literary giant, whispers inspiration to him- La Muse tragique is presented here as a single figure, evoking a heightened pathos befitting its subject’s symbolic identity. Rilke venerated the sculptor’s ability to translate poetic sentiments into figuration, as exemplified by Rodin’s large bronze La Muse tragique (1896). Two decades earlier, Rilke had moved to Paris to write a monograph on Auguste Rodin, initiating a complex but lasting friendship between the two men. Concerned with the interplay of suffering and beauty in human existence, the Elegies also project a hopeful vision of a more peaceful world.

There, while standing atop a cliff overlooking the Adriatic Sea, he claimed to hear the following line: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?” Rilke eventually used these words to open the Duino Elegies, a 1923 collection of ten intensely religious metaphysical poems. In 1912, Rilke was invited to stay at Duino Castle-a fortress just north of Trieste, Italy-by the Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis. Gagosian is pleased to present Duino Elegies, a group exhibition that traces the resonance of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry through artworks spanning the past 150 years. As close readings, the interpretations confront the reader with the great themes of Rilke's oeuvre, in a cycle that moves gradually, but with growing confidence, to an acceptance of the limitations of human life and death.The beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,Īnd we revere it so, because it calmly disdains Commentary and text are interwoven in such a way that the reader is taken step by step into Rilke's world, while fresh English translations are provided for those unable to read the original German. The ten readings that make up this book, by members and former members of the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at Cambridge, seek both to come to terms with the problems of Rilke's language and imagery, and to bring out their poetic qualities. This hymnic verse draws creatively on a tradition of elegiac utterance in German while radically extending that language to the limits of its expressive powers in image and allusion.

Rainer Maria Rilke is frequently acclaimed as the greatest poet writing in German in the twentieth century, and the Duino Elegies are his crowning achievement as a poet.

The duino elegies