Rainer Maria Rilke - As Elegias de Duíno

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), a poet of universal stature, born in Prague when the city still belonged to Austria and who died in Switzerland, erected in his major work "The Duino Elegies" the great symphony of his life and his time, marked by restlessness and anguish, torn apart by the First World War, enveloped in the waves of new philosophies – Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Bergson – and drawn by new discoveries in the field of human psychology – Freud – and in the field of science and technology. If life and death profoundly impressed his sensibility, so did love and pain, joy and sorrow.

In the brilliant and painful experience of writing The Duino Elegies, Rilke found the link between all these diverse realities, and the elegiac tone, expressed in free rhythms, gives way to an elegiac-hymnic tone, as the balance found is exalted and proclaimed. [...]

from the Introduction by Maria Teresa Dias Furtado