'You must change your life': why Rilke matters

We will sketch the life of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 – 1926) including his unhappy childhood, his restless wanderings throughout Europe, his period as secretary to the sculptor Rodin, his sometimes ambiguous relationships with women and his early death from leukemia. Against this background we will read and discuss some of his major short poems from New Poems (1908), extracts from the Duino Elegies and a number of the Sonnets to Orpheus, the rapturous outpouring near the end of his life. We will try to illuminate their meaning by referring to his novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and to Letters to a Young Poet published after his death.
We will read the poems and prose in English translation with the German originals available for those who wish. We will use Martyn Crucefix’s translation of the Duino Elegies and sometimes compare a couple of versions of the shorter poems to help us understand the beauty and subtlety of Rilke’s writing.