Duino Castle and the first elegies In 1910 Rilke completed the loosely autobiographical novel,
Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge) in which a young poet is terrified by the
fragmentation and chaos of
modern urban life. After he experienced a
psychological crisis accompanied by severe
depression. Rilke was invited in late 1911 to
Duino Castle, then part of
Austria-Hungary, by
Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, whom he had met a few years earlier. Rilke and Marie collaborated on a translation of Dante's
La Vita Nuova (
The New Life) while at Duino. After the Princess left to join her husband at their
Lautschin estate, Rilke spent the next few weeks alone to focus on his work. While writing
Das Marien-Leben (
The Life of Mary) in January 1912, Rilke claimed that he heard a voice calling in the roar of the wind while walking along the cliffs near the castle, speaking the words that would become the first lines of the
Duino Elegies: "" ("Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the hierarchies of angels?") He quickly wrote them in his notebook and completed the draft of the '"First Elegy" that night. Within days, he drafted the "Second Elegy" and composed passages and fragments that would later be incorporated into later elegies—including the opening passage of the "Tenth Elegy". In the following years, Rilke worked sporadically on the elegies. While staying at
Ronda, Spain in 1913, he wrote part of what would become the "Sixth Elegy". He moved to Paris later that year where he continued work on the "Sixth Elegy" and completed the "Third Elegy". During World War I, Rilke wrote the "Fourth Elegy", completing it the day before he was
conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army in November 1915. After Rilke was discharged in 1916, he returned to Munich for the duration of the war, but wrote very little poetry during that time.
Château de Muzot and the creative "hurricane" It wasn't until 1920 that Rilke began to focus on completing the
Duino Elegies. Rilke, who had become romantically involved with
Baladine Klossowska, journeyed to Switzerland looking to find a place to live near
Geneva, where he could immerse himself in French culture. Rilke and Klossowska wanted to move into the
Château de Muzot, a 13th-century manor house that lacked gas and electricity, near
Veyras in the
Rhone Valley, but they had trouble negotiating the lease. At Rilke's suggestion,
Werner Reinhart, a Swiss merchant who used his wealth to support composers and writers, leased the property on their behalf. In July 1921, Rilke and Klossowska had moved in. Later, Reinhart bought the property and turned it over to Rilke for life. During the summer of 1921, Rilke's daughter Ruth became engaged. In December, he sent a letter to Gertrud Ouckama Knoop, widow of his deceased friend and mother of the dancer Wera Ouckama Knoop, who was once a friend of Ruth's, announcing the engagement. In turn, Gertrud sent an account of Wera's death at age 19 that moved Rilke to compose the
Sonnets to Orpheus and complete the
Duino Elegies. Rilke wrote that Wera's image dominates and moves the
Sonnets. They frequently refer to her, directly addressing her by name and indirectly through allusions to a dancer or the mythical
Eurydice. Rilke composed in a rush of inspiration: writing nearly all the poems of Part I of the
Sonnets between 2–5 February 1922, completing the
Duino Elegies between 7–15 February, and completing the remaining poems of
Sonnets between 16–22 February. Rilke saw the creation of the
Sonnets and
Elegies as a twin birth. In the midst of his writing, Rilke wrote Klossowska: "That which weighed upon and tortured me is accomplished ... but never within my heart and mind have I borne such a hurricane. I am still trembling from it ... And I went out to caress this old Muzot, just now, in the moonlight." Immediately after completing the
Elegies, he wrote
Lou Andreas-Salomé that he had finished "all in a few days; it was a hurricane, as at Duino that time: all that was fiber, fabric in me, framework, cracked and bent."
Publication and reception Duino Elegies, which are 859 lines long, was published by
Insel-Verlag in
Leipzig in 1923. Prominent critics praised the work and compared its merits to the works of
Hölderlin and
Goethe. During the 1920s, many of the younger generation of poets and writers did not like
Duino Elegies because of the poems' obscure symbols and philosophy. The poet , who is associated with the literary circle of
Stefan George, dismissed the poems as "mystical blather" and described their "secular theology" as "impotent gossip". Novelist
Hermann Hesse describes Rilke as evolving into his best poetry with the
Duino Elegies, that "at each stage now and again the miracle occurs, his delicate, hesitant, anxiety-prone person withdraws, and through him resounds the music of the universe; like the basin of a fountain he becomes at once instrument and ear". In 1935, critic Hans-Rudolf Müller argued that Rilke could be seen as a mystic and the poems could be treated as mystical literature, whereas more recent critics believe the poems should be seen as a study of mysticism itself.
Theodor W. Adorno wrote "But the fact that the neoromantic lyric sometimes behaves like the jargon, or at least timidly readies the way for it, should not lead us to look for the evil of the poetry simply in its form. It is not simply grounded, as a much too innocent view might maintain, in the mixture of poetry and prose.... The evil, in the neoromantic lyric, consists in the fitting out of the words with a theological overtone, which is belied by the condition of the lonely and secular subject who is speaking there: religion as ornament." Adorno further believed the poems reinforced the German value of commitment that supported a cultural attraction towards the principles of Nazism. ==Symbolism and themes==