His affairs with women were intense, literary and dominated by the word ‘soul’

Michael Wood

  • Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke by Ralph Freedman
    Farrar, Straus, 640 pp, $35.00, March 1996, ISBN 0 374 18690 1
  • Uncollected Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Edward Snow
    North Point Press/Farrar, Straus, 266 pp, $22.00, March 1996, ISBN 0 86547 482 6
  • Rilke’s ‘Duino Elegies’: Cambridge Readings edited by Roger Paulin and Peter Hutchinson
    Duckworth/Ariadne, 237 pp, £30.00, March 1996, ISBN 0 572 41032 8

We have all kinds of images of the modern poet, little mythologies made out of snatches of the life and work and reputation. The figure is hieratic and austere, like Maillarmé and Valéry, inward and intricate like Eliot and Pessoa, serenely eccentric like Marianne Moore, public and overflowing like Neruda and Pound.

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