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.

Rainer Maria Rilke offers a compelling portrait of Parisian life, art, and culture at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1902, the young German writer Rainer Maria Rilke traveled to Paris to write a monograph on the sculptor Auguste Rodin. He returned many times over the course of his life, by turns inspired and appalled by the city's high culture and low society, and his writings give a fascinating insight into Parisian art and culture in the last century. Paris was a lifelong source of inspiration for Rilke. Perhaps most significantly, the letters he wrote about it formed the basis of his prose masterpiece, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Much of this work, despite its perennial popularity in French, German, and Italian, has never before been translated into English. This volume brings together a translation of Rilke's essay on poetry, 'Notes on the Melody of Things' and the first English translation of Rilke's experiences in Paris as observed by his French translator.

A look at neglected aspects of the early career of one of the premier poets of the German language.

This book offers a comprehensive sociological study of the nature and dynamics of the modern world, through the use of a series of anthropological concepts, including the trickster, schismogenesis, imitation and liminality. Developing the view that with the theatre playing a central role, the modern world is conditioned as much by cultural processes as it is by economic, technological or scientific ones, the author contends the world is, to a considerable extent, theatrical - a phenomenon experienced as inauthenticity or a loss of direction and meaning. As such the novel is revealed as a means for studying our theatricalised reality, not simply because novels can be understood to be likening the world to theatre, but because they effectively capture and present the reality of a world that has been thoroughly ’theatricalised’ - and they do so more effectively than the main instruments usually employed to analyse reality: philosophy and sociology. With analyses of some of the most important novelists and novels of modern culture, including Rilke, Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Mann, Blixen, Broch and Bulgakov, and focusing on fin-de-siècle Vienna as a crucial ’threshold’ chronotope of modernity, Permanent Liminality and Modernity demonstrates that all seek to investigate and unmask the theatricalisation of modern life, with its progressive loss of meaning and our deteriorating capacity to distinguish between what is meaningful and what is artificial. Drawing on the work of Nietzsche, Bakhtin and Girard to examine the ways in which novels explore the reduction of human existence to a state of permanent liminality, in the form of a sacrificial carnival, this book will appeal to scholars of social, anthropological and literary theory.

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

Presents Rilke's 1922 Sonnets to Orpheus, written in a burst of inspiration, and expressing a vision of a state of being in which all the ordinary human dichotomies are reconciled in an infinite wholeness. Also included is his Letters to a young poet, an influential series of letters written to a young officer cadet on the subject of poetics.

This book, first published in 1946, profiles the influential poet Rainer Maria Rilke, seeing in him and his works a counteracting force to that of the destructive war in Europe. The biography addresses Rilke's life and the influences on his poetry, especially his time spent in Paris and his traumatizing military service in WWI.