Download or read book In the Image of Orpheus RILKE A Soul History written by Daniel Joseph Polikoff and published by Lantern Books. This book was released on with total page 1147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book In the Image of Orpheus written by Daniel Joseph Polikoff and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 759 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Image of Orpheus tells the inner story of Rilke's literary career, tracing--step by step--the mythopoetic journey inscribed in the interweaving lines of the poet's life and art. Blending biography with in-depth analyses of Rilke's poetry and prose (from his little-known Visions of Christ through the Sonnets to Orpheus), the lively narrative draws upon Hillman and Jung, Plato and Petrarch, Apuleius, Ibn Arabi and Lou Andreas-Salom as it unfolds the poet-seer's vision of the nature and destiny of the human soul--a vision as timely as it is timeless.
Download or read book Rilke A Soul History written by Daniel Joseph Polikoff and published by . This book was released on 2011-08-01 with total page 782 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The presumption of a deep link between Rilke's art and the fount of psychology can draw upon biographical--as well as theoretical and textual--evidence. Rilke's life and work were, from the beginning, ineluctably entwined with intellectual historical developments that signaled the surfacing of psyche, the (re)emerging of the soul to consciousness. Born in the same year (1875) as the great Godfather of archetypal psychology, Carl Jung, Rilke's own formative years coincided with those of the professional field of psychology itself. In 1897, when he met Lou Salome (who was later to become a colleague and confidante of Freud), Rilke encountered, through her, ideas about psychology, religion, and art that revolutionized his thinking." (from the introduction) Taking James Hillman's notion of "soul history" to heart, Rilke: A Soul History tells the inner story of Rilke's literary career, tracing, step-by-step, the mythopoetic journey inscribed in the interweaving lines of the poet's life and art. Artfully blending biography with in-depth analyses of Rilke's poetry and prose (from his little-known Visions of Christ through the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus), the lively and engaging narrative draws upon not only Hillman's archetypal psychology but also Plato and Petrarch, Apuleius and Augustine, Ibn 'Arabi and Lou Andreas-Salome, as it unfolds the poet-seer's compelling vision of the nature and destiny of the human soul--a vision as timely as it is timeless.
Download or read book Sonnets to Orpheus Bilingual Edition written by Rainer Maria Rilke and published by . This book was released on 2015-02-28 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: COMPOSED IN A BURST of inspiration near the end of the poet's life, Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus represents the consummation of the writer's career, distilling the essence of his poetic wisdom in a gem-like sequence. This new translation--with the original German on facing pages--offers a clear window into the world of this endlessly scintillating cycle of poems. "Daniel Polikoff's English version of Rilke's last sonnet sequence, perhaps his greatest work, is wholly admirable. Rilke's late work is extremely difficult to penetrate. Both its conceptual nature and Rilke's unique use of the German language tend to resist interpretation. Astonishingly, Polikoff has found ways of rendering Rilke's complexities into English and also preserving his metrical and rhyme schemes. Such an accomplishment is possible only with a deep understanding of Rilke's vision and a knowledge of the root structure of German. Daniel Polikoff gives us Rilke in word and spirit in these splendid Sonnets."--LISEL MUELLER, National Book Award for Poetry (1981) for The Need to Hold Still; Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1997) for Alive Together: New & Selected Poems "Daniel Polikoff is the first to achieve the unimaginable: an English translation which brings the form and content of these Sonnets together into an organic confluence. These new translations lift our understanding of Rilke's spiritual and aesthetic inspiration up to a whole different level, one accessible for the first time to the English reader. As a professor of German literature who has taught these sonnets for over thirty years, I can only thank Daniel Polikoff for this phenomenal accomplishment. His version should serve as the new standard for Rilke translations and belongs on the bookshelves of every poetry lover."--LUDWIG MAX FISCHER, author of Seasons of the Soul: The Poetic Guidance of Herman Hesse "This is a uniquely faithful, skillful, and eloquent translation of one of the greatest poems of the 20th century. I salute Daniel Polikoff and recommend his wonderful work to all seekers and lovers of poetry."--ANDREW HARVEY, author of Teachings of Rumi Poet-scholar Daniel Joseph Polikoff has published two books of poetry as well as a major work on Rilke and depth psychology: In the Image of Orpheus: Rilke-A Soul History.
Download or read book Radical Passion written by Andrew Harvey and published by North Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2012-10-23 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This culmination of award-winning author Andrew Harvey’s life’s work bridges the great divide between spiritual resignation and engaged spiritual activism. A manifesto for the transformation of the world through the fusion of deep mystical peace with the clarity of radical wisdom, it is a wake-up call to put love and compassion to urgent, focused action. According to Harvey, we are in a massive global crisis reflected by a mass media addicted to violence and trivialization at a moment when what the world actually needs is profound inspiration, a return to the heart-centered way of the Divine Feminine, the words of the mystics throughout the ages, and the cultivation of the nonviolent philosophies of Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, and the Dalai Lama. Harvey’s concepts of radical passion and sacred activism fly in the face of restraint, of pessimism, of denial, of all that is inhumane, fusing the mystic’s passion for God with the activist’s passion for justice and for healing the division between heaven and earth, heart and will, body and soul, prayer and action. Sacred activism asks that we engage deeply on a personal, spiritual, and political level so as to become a fully empowered, fully active, and contemplative humanity that can turn tragedy into grace, and desolation into the opportunity to build and co-create a new world. Unlike many spiritual books, Radical Passion does not veil the dark with artificial hope. It explores the catastrophes of our current times and celebrates the ecstatic hope and divinity that is possible—right now and in the future.
Download or read book Rue Rilke written by Daniel Joseph Polikoff and published by Chiron Publications. This book was released on 2016-03-30 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Travelogue, literary autobiography, and journalistic exposé of the mores of capital punishment, Rue Rilke chronicles its author's initiatory Rilke pilgrimage to France and Switzerland and—upon his return to America—his up-close involvement in death penalty politics. Immersed in the legal and human drama unfolding in Houston in the days leading up to an impending execution, the intimate linkage of love and death learned from Rilke aid him in his efforts to confront his country's sanction of lethal violence and make spiritual sense of his torn, too often black-and-white world. “Poetry matters and this book shows us why. The astonishing range of Rue Rilke—a travel diary, a meditation on Rilke, and a gripping account of efforts to oppose an unjust judicial execution—reveals the essense of what James Hillman calls soul-making. Poet, essayist, and passionate abolitionist, Daniel Polikoff gives us a book dedicated to the fiery poetry of life itself.” SUSAN ROWLAND, author of Jung as a Writer and The Ecocritical Psyche “In his stunning early book Rue Rilke, Daniel Joseph Polikoff offers us an impassioned and stylistically brilliant travelogue. With Rilke as his Virgil, he descends in quest of the feminine values he must labor to integrate into contemporary life. Never before has Rilke’s mythic identification with the prodigal son been so personally authenticated, taken up with such imaginative immersion and inquisitive grace. A remarkable achievement.” BRUCE BOND, University of North Texas, author of Immanent Distance “Polikoff's is a profound and spacious spiritual imagination. That passionate young man who wrote of his experiences one summer more than two decades ago was filled with the old wisdom of The Poet, the song-lines of landscape, and the prophetic voice that dares confront “the fear that guts the spiritual house of this land.” We need his voice now in our own deeply disturbed times.” NAOMI RUTH LOWINSKY, author of The Sister from Below and The Faust Woman Poems Poet, translator, and internationally recognized Rilke scholar Daniel Joseph Polikoff received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University and his Diploma in Waldorf Education from Rudolf Steiner College. In addition to work in numerous literary journals, he has published five books of poetry, translation, and criticism, incuding In the Image of Orpheus: Rilke—A Soul History and a bilingual translation of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus. Dr. Polikoff has taught literature in Waldorf high schools as well as courses in literature and depth psychology at Sonoma State University and the California Institute of Integral Studies. He has shared his passion for Rilke in a wide variety of venues in the United States and abroad, including annual meetings of the International Rilke and Jean Gebser Societies, the San Francisco Jung Institute, and the Napa Valley Writer's Conference. His webinars on Rilke: Poetry and Alchemy and Rilke and the Hermetic Tradition are available through the Asheville Jung Center. He resides with his wife Monika and family in the San Francisco Bay area. More information is available at danielpolikoff.com.
Download or read book Rilke in the Making A Comprehensive Study of His Life and Work from 1897 to 1926 in Three Volumes written by John O'Meara and published by HcP Ottawa. This book was released on 2023-09-02 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 ten 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, who is understood to have been a far more problematic influence on him 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. JOHN O’MEARA received his PhD from the University of East Anglia in 1986. He taught for many years at the University of Toronto and the University of Ottawa. He is the author of 'The Way of Novalis' and 'Remembering Shakespeare.' Visit the author’s website at johnomeara.squarespace.com
Download or read book Migration and Mutation written by Carole Birkan-Berz and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2023-02-23 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spanning four centuries from the Renaissance to today's avant-garde, Migration and Mutation explores how the sonnet has evolved in and out of translation. Contributors examine little-studied translation trajectories in the early modern period, such as the pivotal role of France between Italy and England or the first German sonnets and their Italian, French, Dutch and Scottish origins. Essays then shed new light on major European sonneteers In the 19th and 20th centuries, including Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats, Rilke and Pessoa, alongside lesser-known contemporaries and with novel approaches. And finally, contributors explore how translation and adaptation create metaphorical space in the 21st century. Migration and Mutation also pays attention to the political or subversive dimension of the sonnet, with essays on women, gay or postcolonial reclaimings of the sonnet and recent experiments such as post-Soviet Sonnets on shirts by Genrikh Sagpir. It takes the sonnet out of the confines of enclosed national traditions bringing it into renewed contact with mostly European, but also other, cultures.
Download or read book Ludwig Strauss An Approach to His Bilingual Parallel Poems written by Julia Matveev and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is devoted to the study of the bilingual “parallel poems” of Ludwig Strauss (Aachen 1892 ˗ Jerusalem 1953) created between 1934 and 1952 in Palestine/Israel and which exist in two variants, a Hebrew and a German version, one of which is the original and the other a self-translation. The aim of this study is to compare the versions and their interpretation based on Strauss’s theoretical essays on poetry and translation, his political writings and works of literary criticism. Special attention is paid to Strauss’s concept (linked with the idea of messianic redemption) of poetry as a “fore-image” of a future true community of men and as “the earthly expression of the Absolute” directed at interpreting divine revelation and its “translation” into human language. In examining Strauss’s experiments with self-translation, by which he aimed at establishing a dialogue between languages, and between people and nations, this study considers the two processes of translation: from divine speech into human language and from one human language into another.
Download or read book Duino Elegies written by Rainer Maria Rilke and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2023 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new translation of Rilke's great work with close readings of each of the ten elegies elucidating how their poetic attributes constitute their meaning. Rilke continues to be the most read and discussed German poet of the modern period. The Duino Elegies, together with the Sonnets to Orpheus, remain his greatest achievement. The themes of the ten elegies - and the conceptual world unique to Rilke from which they emerge - can best be understood through their poetic form: their imagery and neologistic formations, their angular syntax, their abrupt changes of tone and linguistic register, their use of multiple personae and speaking voices, and the often-ironic self-presentation of the author. Commentators, however, have often treated these features as mere formal devices that we can somehow see through to get to what really matters, that is, to what Rilke has to say about the human condition or the meaning of life, to his philosophy or worldview. On the contrary, they are constitutive of meaning in the elegies, and understanding them is crucial to our experience of reading Rilke's work. The purpose of this book is to make such features visible and to explain them to the reader as clearly as possible. This is the first full-length book in English devoted to the elegies in over thirty years. It offers an entirely new translation of each elegy, paired with the original German text, and a close reading of each.
Download or read book The Magic of the Orphic Hymns written by Tamra Lucid and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-08-22 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recaptures the magical vitality of the original Orphic Hymns • Presents literary translations of the teletai that restore important esoteric details and correspondences about the being or deity to which each hymn is addressed • Includes messages inscribed on golden leaves meant to be passports for the dead as well as a reinvention of a lost hymn to Number that preserves the original mystical intent of the teletai • Explores the obscure origins and the evolution of the Orpheus myth, revealing a profound influence on countercultures throughout Western history As famous Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino wrote, “No magic is more powerful than that of the Orphic Hymns.” These legendary teletai of Orpheus were not simply “hymns”—they were initiatic poems for meditation and ritual, magical, and ceremonial use, each one addressed to a specific deity, such as Athena or Zeus, or a virtue, such as Love, Justice, and Equality. Yet despite the mystical concepts underlying them, the original hymns were formulaic, creating an obstacle for translators. Recapturing the magical vitality that inspired mystery cults through the ages, Tamra Lucid and Ronnie Pontiac present new versions of the teletai that include important esoteric details and correspondences about the being or deity to which each hymn is addressed. The authors also include a new version of a lost hymn called “Number” and messages that were inscribed on golden leaves meant to be passports for the dead, reinventions that preserve the original magical intent and mysticism of the teletai. Revealing the power of the individual hymns to attune the reader to the sacred presence of the Orphic Mysteries and the higher order of nature, the authors also show how, taken together, the Orphic Hymns are a book of hours or a calendar of life, addressing every event, from birth to death, and walking us through all the experiences of human existence as necessary and holy.
Download or read book AUDINT Unsound Undead written by Steve Goodman and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-06-18 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the the potential of sound, infrasound, and ultrasound to access anomalous zones of transmission between the realms of the living and the dead. For as long as recording and communications technologies have existed, operators have evoked the potential of sound, infrasound, and ultrasound to access anomalous zones of transmission between the realms of the living and the dead. In Unsound:Undead, contributors from a variety of disciplines chart these undead zones, mapping out a nonlinear timeline populated by sonic events stretching from the 8th century BC (the song of the Sirens), to 2013 (acoustic levitation), with a speculative extension into 2057 (the emergence of holographic and holosonic phenomena). For the past seven years the AUDINT group has been researching peripheral sonic perception (unsound) and the ways in which frequencies are utilized to modulate our understanding of presence/non-presence, entertainment/torture, and ultimately life/death. Concurrently, themes of hauntology have inflected the musical zeitgeist, resonating with the notion of a general cultural malaise and a reinvestment in traces of lost futures inhabiting the present. This undead culture has already spawned a Lazarus economy in which Tupac, ODB, and Eazy-E are digitally revivified as laser-lit holograms. The obscure otherworldly dimensions of sound have also been explored in the sonic fictions produced by the likes of Drexciya, Sun Ra, and Underground Resistance, where hauntology is virtually extended: the future appears in the cracks of the present. The contributions to this volume reveal how the sonic nurtures new dimensions in which the real and the imagined (fictional, hyperstitional, speculative) bleed into one another, where actual sonic events collide with spatiotemporal anomalies and time-travelling entities, and where the unsound serves to summon the undead. Contributors Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Lendl Barcelos, Charlie Blake, Lisa Blanning, Brooker Buckingham, Al Cameron, Erik Davis, Kodwo Eshun, Matthew Fuller, Kristen Gallerneaux, Lee Gamble, Agnès Gayraud, Steve Goodman, Anna Greenspan, Olga Gurionova, S. Ayesha Hameed, Tim Hecker, Julian Henriques, Toby Heys, Eleni Ikoniadou, Amy Ireland, Nicola Masciandaro, Ramona Naddaff, Anthony Nine, The Occulture, Luciana Parisi, Alina Popa, Paul Purgas, Georgina Rochefort, Steven Shaviro, Jonathan Sterne, Jenna Sutela, Eugene Thacker, Dave Tompkins, Shelley Trower, and Souzana Zamfe.
Download or read book Translations an autoethnography written by Paul Carter and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-21 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Translations is a personal history written at the intersection of colonial anthropology, creative practice and migrant ethnography. Renowned postcolonial scholar, public artist and radio maker, UK-born Paul Carter documents and discusses a prodigiously varied and original trajectory of writing, sound installation and public space dramaturgy produced in Australia to present the phenomenon of contemporary migration in an entirely new light. Migrant space-time, Carter argues, is not linear, but turbulent, vortical and opportunistic. Before-and-after narratives fail to capture the work of self-becoming and serve merely to perpetuate colonialist fantasies. The ‘mirror state’ relationship between England and Australia, its structurally symmetrical histories of land theft and internal colonisation, repress the appearance of new subjects and subject relations. Reflecting on collaborations with Aboriginal artists, Carter argues for a new definition of the stranger-host relationship predicated on recognition of Aboriginal sovereignty. Carter calls the creative practice that breaks the cycle of repeated invasion ‘dirty art’. Translations is a passionately eloquent argument for reframing borders as crossing-places: framing less murderous exchange rates, symbolic literacy, creative courage and, above all, the emergence of a resilient migrant poetics will be essential.
Download or read book The Life and Ideas of James Hillman written by Dick Russell and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-05-30 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Hillman, who died in 2011 at the age of eighty-five, has been described by poet Robert Bly as “the most lively and original psychologist” of the twentieth century. Based on author Dick Russell’s interviews with Hillman and dozens of people who knew him, Volume Two of The Life and Ideas of James Hillman takes up Hillman’s mid-life when he set about returning psychology to its Soul-rich roots in Greek mythology and Renaissance esotericism. From his base teaching at Zurich’s Jung Institute, we follow Hillman’s growing international prominence as a maverick in the field, coinciding with his relationship and eventual marriage to Patricia Berry. They would be instrumental in formulating Archetypal Psychology, along with a group of young compatriots in what became known as Spring House. The new ideas taking shape moved psychology away from the dominant scientific/medical model with its focus on treating the isolated individual, expanding into the fertile realm of culture and the imagination. Amid prodigious writings and lectures, Hillman made mythology and even alchemy relevant to our times. Delivering the prestigious Terry Lectures at Yale and being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, Hillman returned to America after living primarily in Europe for thirty years. To the surprise of many, he settled in Dallas and helped found an Institute of Humanities and Culture while taking up how to re-imagine city planning. Equally surprising was Hillman’s subsequent move to rural Connecticut, where he and Pat Berry resided in a nineteenth-century farmhouse. Starting in the mid-’80s, Hillman became a pioneering teacher in the mythopoetic men’s movement alongside Robert Bly and Michael Meade—where deep talk about fathers and sons and male-female relationships offered a new kind of group therapy, a cultural therapy. As Thomas Moore said of Hillman, he possessed a “genius for taking any theme and shedding serious fresh light on it.” Along the way, Hillman’s insights came to encompass all of the arts, a “poetic basis of mind” that connected him to many of the most influential artists and thinkers of the modern era.
Download or read book Orpheus written by Ann Wroe and published by ABRAMS. This book was released on 2012-05-24 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] startlingly original history that traces the obscure origins and tangled relationships of the Orpheus myth from ancient times through today” (Library Journal). For at least two and a half millennia, the figure of Orpheus has haunted humanity. Half-man, half-god, musician, magician, theologian, poet, and lover, his story never leaves us. He may be myth, but his lyre still sounds, entrancing everything that hears it: animals, trees, water, stones, and men. In this extraordinary work, Ann Wroe goes in search of Orpheus, tracing the man and the power he represents through the myriad versions of a fantastical life: his birth in Thrace, his studies in Egypt, his voyage with the Argonauts to fetch the Golden Fleece, his love for Eurydice and the journey to Hades, and his terrible death. We see him tantalizing Cicero and Plato, and breathing new music into Gluck and Monteverdi; occupying the mind of Jung and the surreal dreams of Cocteau; scandalizing the fathers of the early Church, and filling Rilke with poems like a whirlwind. He emerges as not simply another mythical figure but the force of creation itself, singing the song of light out of darkness and life out of death. “Did Orpheus exist? Wroe thinks he did, and still does, and dedicates this lyrical biography to doubters.” —The New Yorker “This insightful and visionary study, treading a perfect line between imagination and scholarship, is as readable and necessary as a fine novel. Ted Hughes, another mythographer, would have loved it.” —The Independent “A book to make readers laugh, sing and weep.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “[Orpheus] will leave you dancing.” —New Statesman
Download or read book Ahead of All Parting written by Rainer Maria Rilke and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2015-01-21 with total page 635 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The reputation of Rainer Maria Rilke has grown steadily since his death in 1926; today he is widely considered to be the greatest poet of the twentieth century. This Modern Library edition presents Stephen Mitchell’s acclaimed translations of Rilke, which have won praise for their re-creation of the poet’s rich formal music and depth of thought. “If Rilke had written in English,” Denis Donoghue wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “he would have written in this English.” Ahead of All Parting is an abundant selection of Rilke’s lifework. It contains representative poems from his early collections The Book of Hours and The Book of Pictures; many selections from the revolutionary New Poems, which drew inspiration from Rodin and Cezanne; the hitherto little-known “Requiem for a Friend”; and a generous selection of the late uncollected poems, which constitute some of his finest work. Included too are passages from Rilke’s influential novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and nine of his brilliant uncollected prose pieces. Finally, the book presents the poet’s two greatest masterpieces in their entirety: the Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus. “Rilke’s voice, with its extraordinary combination of formality, power, speed and lightness, can be heard in Mr. Mitchell’s versions more clearly than in any others,” said W. S. Merwin. “His work is masterful.”
Download or read book The Beginning of Terror written by David Kleinbard and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1993-02-01 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The insights here are of such depth, and contain such beauty in them, that time and again the reader must pause for breath. At last Rilke has met a critic whose insight, courage, and humanity are worthy of his life and work." —Leslie Epstein Director, Graduate Creative Writing Program, Boston University "[A] well-reasoned, fairly fascinating, and illuminating study which soundly and convincingly applies Freudian and particularly post-Freudian insights into the self, to Rilke's life and work, in a way which enlightens us considerably as to the relationship between life and work in original ways. Kleinbard takes off where Hugo Simenauer's monumental psycho- biography of Rilke (1953) left off. . . . He succeeds in giving us a psychic portrait of the poet which is more illuminating and which . . . does greater justice to its subject than any of his predecessors.. . . . Any reader with strong interest in Rilke would certainly welcome the availability of this study." —Walter H. Sokel,Commonwealth Professor of German and English Literatures,University of Virginia. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are just able to bear, and we wonder at it so because it calmly disdainsto destroy us." —Rilke Beginning with Rilke's 1910 novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, The Beginning of Terror examines the ways in which the poet mastered the illness that is so frightening and crippling in Malte and made the illness a resource for his art. Kleinbard goes on to explore Rilke's poetry, letters, and non-fiction prose, his childhood and marriage, and the relationship between illness and genius in the poet and his work, a subject to which Rilke returned time and again. This psychoanalytic study also defines the complex connections between Malte's and Rilke's fantasies of mental and physical fragmentation, and the poet's response to Rodin's disintegrative and re-integrative sculpture during the writing of The Notebooks and New Poems. One point of departure is the poet's sense of the origins of his illness in his childhood and, particularly, in his mother's blind, narcissistic self- absorption and his father's emotional constriction and mental limitations. Kleinbard examines the poet's struggle to purge himself of his deeply felt identification with his mother, even as he fulfilled her hopes that he become a major poet. The book also contains chapters on Rilke's relationships with Lou Andreas Salom and Aguste Rodin, who served as parental surrogates for Rilke. A psychological portrait of the early twentieth-century German poet, The Beginning of Terror explores Rilke's poetry, letters, non-fiction prose, his childhood and marriage. David Kleinbard focuses on the relationship between illness and genius in the poet and his work, a subject to which Rilke returned time and again.
