The work, dedicated to Lou Andreas-Salome, is his first through-composed cycle, which established his reputation as a religious poet, culminating in the poet's Duino Elegies.[1] In provocative language, using a turn-of-the-century Art Nouveau aesthetic, Rilke displayed a wide range of his poetic talent. The suggestive musicality of his verses developed into the hallmark of his later lyric poetry, to mixed criticism.[2]
The first book, The Book of Monastic Life, initially titled "The Prayers" (Die Gebete), was written between 20 September and 14 October 1899 in Berlin-Schmargendorf, where Rilke had also composed The Lay of the Love and Death of Christoph Cornet. The middle part of the cycle was written (after his marriage to Clara Westhoff but before the birth of his daughter) from 18 to 25 September 1901 in Westerwede. The last book was composed from 13 to 20 April 1903 in Viareggio, Italy.
the book of hours poet
Two years later, now in Worpswede, he revised the text, which was then published in December 1905 - his first collaboration with Insel-Verlag. This introductory book would continue to be published throughout his lifetime, requiring four editions for a total of approximately 60,000 copies.
Rilke himself claimed poetic inspiration for the origin of the verses, something which was to characterise his work later. Waking in the morning, or in the evening, he had received words like divinations he needed only to transcribe afterwards.[8]
The collective title comes from the book of hours, a type of illuminated breviary popular in France in the later Middle Ages.[3] These prayer and worship books were often decorated with illumination and so combined religious edification with art. They contained prayers for different times of the day and were designed to structure the day through regular devotion to God.
The provisional nature of religious poetic speech corresponds to the form of the collection, with its loosely arranged poems, the scope of which are very different. Rilke played with a wide variety of verse forms and used numerous virtuoso lyrical means at his disposal: enjambment and internal rhyme, suggestive imagery, forced rhyme and rhythm, alliteration and assonance. Other distinctive characteristics include the popular, often polysyndetic conjunction "and" as well as frequent nominalization, which is sometimes regarded as mannerist.[12]
A decade after the sudden and tragic loss of the poet's father, we witness the unfolding of his grief. "In the night I brush / my teeth with a razor," he tells us, in one of the collection's piercing two-line poems. Young captures the strange silence of bereavement: "Not the storm/ but the calm/ that slays me." But the poet acknowledges, even celebrates, life's passages, his loss transformed and tempered in a sequence describing the birth of his son: in "Crowning," he delivers what is surely one of the most powerful birth poems written by a man, describing "her face / full of fire, then groaning your face / out like a flower, blood-bloom, / crocused into air." Ending this book of birth and grief, the gorgeous title sequence brings acceptance, asking "What good//are wishes if they aren't/ used up?" while understanding "How to listen/ to what's gone."
Award-winning poet Kevin Young says he's never really finished writing a book until he can hold it in his hand and read from it, so in coming weeks, Emory's Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing will be crisscrossing the country, bringing to completion his newly published volume, "Book of Hours."
Young is teaching an advanced poetry workshop at Emory this spring, and his students are writing poems based on a busy roster of visiting writers this semester, including Pulitzer Prize-winners Tracy K. Smith, Paul Muldoon and Sharon Olds (coming as part of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series, curated by Young, on March 20).
This past week students were writing elegies, "not just to people, but to things, places; whatever absence they wanted to confront." Young hopes they will produce poems of real weight that explore this longstanding tradition of poetry.
"I didn't grow up knowing poets," says Young, "so having a chance to study with someone who was writing about a world that was far away but not so very different from rural Louisiana where my parents are from was really a tremendous gift."
Fletcher Tucker is a multi-instrumentalist, analogue producer, visual artist, poet, essayist, and teacher. He is the founder and art director of Gnome Life Records, a vinyl record label based on the unceded homeland of the Esselen People in so-called Big Sur, California. His records include Native Tongue, Offering, and Cold Spring.
Emory University poet Kevin Young has won the 2015 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for "Book of Hours," his collection of poems about the loss of his father and the birth of his son. The Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize recognizes the most outstanding book of poetry published in the United States in the previous calendar year.
"As if walking through a gallery of grief, reverie, and transcendence, Kevin Young's 'Book of Hours' exemplifies what poetry can do in the world when language works at its full power," said judge A. Van Jordan. "The poems in this collection hold emotion taut on each line while allowing for the nimbleness of language to drape over them, bringing tension between the heart and the mind, as Young consistently surprises us with profound elegance."
Young is the author of eight other books of poetry, including "Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels," winner of a 2012 American Book Award; and "Jelly Roll: A Blues," a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the editor of "The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food & Drink," and seven other collections.
His book, "The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness" won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, and won the PEN Open Book Award.
Poetry is reality's essence visioned and made manifest by one endowedwith a perception acutely sensitive to sound, form, and colour, andgifted with a power to shape into rhythmic and rhymed verbal symbols thereaction to Life's phenomena. The poet moulds that which appearsevanescent and ephemeral in image and in mood into everlasting values.In this act of creation he serves eternity.
The most eminent contemporary poets of Europe have, each in accordancewith his individual temperament, reflected in their work the spiritualessence of our age, its fears and failures, its hopes and highachievements: Maeterlinck, with his mood of resignation and hisretirement into a dusky twilight where his shadowy figures movenoiselessly like phantoms in fate-laden dimness; Dehmel, the worshipperof will, with his passion for materiality and the beauty of all thingsphysical and tangible; Verhaeren, the visionary of a new vitality, whosees in the toilers of fields and factories the heroic gesture of ourtime and who might have written its great epic of industry but for theoverwhelming lyrical mood of his soul.
Until a few years ago, known only to a relatively small community on thecontinent but commanding an ever increasing attention which has bornehis name far beyond the boundary of his country, the personality ofRainer Maria Rilke stands to-day beside the most illustrious poets ofmodern Europe.
The background against which the figure of Rainer Maria Rilke issilhouetted is so varied, the influences which have entered into hislife are so manifold, that a study of his work, however slight, mustneeds take into consideration the elements through which this poet hasmatured into a great master.
As one turns the pages of Rilke's first small book of poems, publishedoriginally under the title Larenopfer, in the year 1895, and whichappeared in more recent editions under the less descriptive name ErsteGedichte, one realizes at once, in spite of a lack of plasticity in thepresentation, that here speaks one who has lingered long and lovinglyover the dream of his boyhood. As the title indicates, these poems are atribute, an offering to the Lares, the home spirits of his native town.Prague and the surrounding country are the ever recurring theme ofalmost every one of these poems. The meadows, the maidens, the darkriver in the evening, the spires of the cathedral at night rising likegrey mists are seen with a wonderment, the great well-spring of allpoetic imagination, with a well-nigh religious piety. Through all thesepoems there sounds like a subdued accompaniment a note of gratitude forthe ability to thus vision the world, to be sunk in the music of allthings. "Without is everything that I feel within myself, and withoutand within myself everything is immeasurable, illimitable."
These pictures of town and landscape are never separated from theirpersonal relation to the poet. He feels too keenly his dependence uponthem, as a child views flowers and stars as personal possessions. Notuntil later was he to reach the height of an impersonal objectivity inhis art. What distinguishes these early poems from similar adolescentproductions is the restraint in the presentation, the economy andintensity of expression and that quality of listening to the inner voiceof things which renders the poet the seer of mankind.
The second book of poems appeared two years later and like the firstvolume Traumgekrönt is full of the music that is reminiscent of themild melancholy of the Bohemian folk-songs, in whose gentle rhythms thebarbaric strength of the race seems to be lulled to rest as the waves ofa far-away tumultuous sea gently lap the shore. The themes ofTraumgekrönt are extended somewhat beyond the immediate environmentof Prague and some of the most beautiful poems are luminous pictures ofvillages hidden in the snowy blossoming of May and June, out of whichrises here and there the solitary soft voice of a boy or girl singing.In these first two volumes the poet is satisfied with painting in words,full of sonorous beauty, the surrounding world. From this period datesthe small poem Evening, which seems to have been sketched by aJapanese painter, so clear and colourful is its texture, so precious andprecise are its outlines. 2ff7e9595c
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