Цитаты из книги Reading Rilke's Orphic Identity: v. 101

In one sense, therefore, Rilke followed Romanticism in viewing the artist as a supremely individual creator, whose imagination, creative spirit, and expression, once inspired, could open doors to transcendent experience and spiritual truth.

Thus, the three facets of Orpheus - lover, musician, and priest - are united in one character ["Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes." 1904]

Reversing classical aesthetics in the spirit of the symbolists, the early Rilke views art not as semblance, but as reality. Consequently, for this Rilke, there is more reality in a poet's expression than in the ordinary human experience of human relations, in consequence, poetry was never about imitatio, about the…

This image of the language crisis of the fin de siècle is also associated with a search for a new mysticism - to what Paul Valéry called "mysticism without God" and which Hofmannsthal spoke of in his Chandos-Brief as a "situation of a mystic without mystique".

This essay is identified today as symptomatic of the crisis that undermined the aesthetic Symbolist movement of the end of the century. With this essay, most critics believe, Hofmannsthal renounced purely lyrical forms and, after a period of reorientation and transition, chose instead to focus his efforts on playwriting…

["Die Sonette an Orpheus" 1922] Rilke's new Orpheus poetry evokes the ancient magic associated with language and the song: "Gesang it's Dasein" and "Orpheus ists, wenn es singt." The poetic voice, as sound transversing space, becomes the mediator that travels between the worlds of actualities and possibilities, the living…

["Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes." 1904] Rilke's added focus on Hermes offers the reader a new observing perspective, watching the drama unfolding from within - from the point of view of a character who is simultaneously part of, yet ultimately outside the traditional core of the action. In so doing, Rilke has introduced a…

["Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes." 1904] Rilke resignifies the myth's link to present patterns of cultural, social and personal experience, especially by shifting focus from the two central figures, Orpheus and Eurydice, and instead focusing on hermaphroditic and hermetic figure of Hermes, who symbolically represents a…

For Rilke, Orpheus came to symbolize the very essence and embodiment of poetry. As Charles Segal points out, "Rilke's conception of Orpheus goes back to the notion, inherent in the ear least stories of Orpheus, of the basic interrelatedness of all parts of the world. The magic of the poet's song makes visible and…

Where the Romantics had sought to use the human soul to create a new mythology and restore our vision of humanity's inner self (a self squashed by habits, values, rules, and standards imposed by society), Rilke realised that the humanity of his own epoch was fragmented and not whole, but rather needed to reset abolish the…