Joan Aleshire: Rilke’s Duino Elegies (July 1996)

Rilke considered The Duino Elegies his greatest achievement, poet Joan Aleshire tells us, the “work he’d waited for all his life.” In this lecture, Aleshire examines how The Duino Elegies are made, at a craft level—how they work both individually and as part of the whole; she invites us, too, to regard the Elegies as a record of the poet’s larger vision, his attempt, as he put it to his Polish translator, to “stamp this provisional, perishing earth [into himself]…that its being may rise again, ‘invisibly,’” in his poems.