Reading Rilke with Mark Wunderlich

While walking on the cliffs above the Adriatic near Duino Castle in Trieste, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke claims to have heard a voice on the wind, saying: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?”

This dramatic question, which is part mystical experience and part an act of self-mythologizing, urged the poet to write a group of ten poems that would become a masterpiece of European Modernism, and which would take him ten years to complete. With their digressions and leaps, their treatises on children, animals, puppets and angels, and in a voice that is both otherworldly and almost posthumous, Rilke managed to make a body of work that is sufficiently strange and beautiful enough that we are still drawn to the “terrible angels” animating these poems.

Class meets Wednesdays: Jan 20, 27, Feb 3 and 10.