A review by msand3
Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke

4.0

Beautiful, stirring, and full of the startling language that I admire in Rilke, yet not his work that speaks the most to me. I prefer the earlier elegies, if only because the mystical unknowable is grounded in a more known concept (love), which is quite ironic, I realize. In these poems, humans are ethereal beings more so than the angels, despite (or perhaps because of?) our fleeting connection to the earth. This is both the cycle’s strength and it’s biggest stumbling block -- if it can be called that -- due to the tendency to seem overly-esoteric in the later elegies, which surpasses even that of Novalis or Hölderlin, both of whom are able to better temper their transcendental spiritual flights. In any case, it’s a must-read classic of 20th century verse.