To Celebrate or to Regret: Rilke

Abstract

The present essay approaches the poetry of Rainer Marie Rilke beyond the readings which define him as an hermetic or even mystic poet. It tries to expose how Rilke’s poetic process seems to be an attempt to grasp the constitutive emptiness of the word. It shows how Rilke declares a propriety of death as necessary part of the process of grasping. It also tries to show how the poet’s project, here called esoteric, bumps up against a limit: exactly the declaration of a propriety of death in the same moment in which the poet intends to become a thing, an object. Therefore, it demonstrates how Rilke realizes the emptiness that constitutes the human without, however, go on with this idea. It concludes that the poetry of Rilke becomes a regret for the loss of the propriety of death and even of the human.