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Sutherland, Marielle: Images of Absence: Death and the Language of Concealment in the
Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
(Amsterdamer Publikationen zur Sprache und Literatur, Band 164)
ISBN 3-89693-461-9
(05/2006)
302 Seiten, 22 x 15 cm, 2 Abb., Kt., EUR 44,00
Images of Absence: Death and the Language of Concealment in the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke discusses Rilke’s exploration of death as ambivalence, anonymity and invisibility in images of deferral and encryption, examining poems from New Poems to Sonnets to Orpheus,
with special attention to the Requiem poems of 1908. Its contribution to Rilke scholarship is to more fully state Rilke’s production of an ‘otherness’ of death in self-consciously literary devices
that emphasise the ‘art’ in ‘articulation’ and propose that the human relation to death is made in the paradoxes of poetic writing, integrating death via its resistance to interpretation and
integration. Under this focus, the ‘death of one’s own’ (‘der eigene Tod’) of the middle period takes on more artistic implications than previous interpretations of it have permitted.
It becomes the poet’s work or ‘making’ of death, a construct in which death’s alienation appears charged, completed and aestheticised in metaphors, similes and poetic forms that represent
language reaching beyond modes of familiarisation into depersonalised, estranged spaces. The study traces through the different phases of Rilke’s poetry the relation he sets up between the textuality of the
text and the hidden quality of death.
Table of Contents
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter 1: Death as the Summation of Life
Introduction
1.1 Integrating the Difference
of Death
1.2 The Fruit of the ‘Death of one’s Own’
1.3 The Burden of Death’s Difference
1.4 The Inspiration of the Outside
Chapter 2: The Written Work of Death: New Poems
Introduction
2.1 Rewriting the Real
2.2 Writing and Dying at the Limit
2.3 The Dead Body and the Body of the Poem
2.4 ‘Die Figur’
2.5 The Outside on the Inside
Chapter 3: Requiem
for a Friend
Introduction
Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker
The Poetry of Requiem
3.1 The Circle as the ‘Figure’ of the ‘Death of one’s Own’
3.2 Paula
Modersohn-Becker’s Art
3.3 The Death Seed
3.4 ‘Klagen’
Summary
Chapter 4: Requiem for Wolf Graf von Kalckreuth
Introduction
4.1 The Burden of Poetry
4.2
‘Nichts als Bild’: The Poetic Image
4.3 The Death which is not one’s Own – Committing Artistic Suicide
4.4 Rilke and the ‘Figure’ of Kalckreuth
Chapter 5: The
Concealed Death in Rilke’s Late Poetry
5.1 Weltinnenraum
5.2 Aussparung
5.3 The Duino Elegies: the language of absence, transience, abstraction
5.4 The Tenth Elegy
5.5 Sonnets
to Orpheus
Conclusion
Appendices
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
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