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Articles

The Poet’s Metaphysical Role

Rilke thought that the point of poetry was to immortalize that which is transitory. Peter Rickman explains.

“Why have to be human?” the poet Rilke asks in the first sentence of his 9th Duino Elegy. He answers in the next sentence: “Because being here amounts to so much, because all this here and now so fleeting seems to require us and strangely concerns us.” A little later he elucidates this claim. “Are we perhaps here just for saying: house, bridge, window…? But for saying, remember, oh for such saying as never the things themselves hoped so intensely to be” and just a little later “here is the time for the sayable. Here is its home.

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