Rilke's great cycle of ten elegies, perhaps his most profound poetic achievement, had its inception on the morning of January 21, 1912, but was interrupted by the First World War and not completed until a decade later. The Duino Elegies are not only the result of an extraordinary kind of contact with the unseen world; they are an attempt to understand that world in its holistic relationship to the visible, tangible world. This powerful rendering ofthe cycle is a product of the collaboration between a poet, Norris, and a Germanist, Keele.

Translated by: Leslie Norris, Alan Keele