The life of Rilkes work is in its words, and this book attends closely to the life unfolding in Rilkes words over the course of his career. What is a poem, and how does it act upon us as we read? What does reading involve? These are questions of the greatest interest to Rilke, who addresses them in several poems and for whom the experience of reading affords an interaction with the worlda recalibration of our ways of attending to itwhich sets it apart from other kinds of experience. Rilkes work is often approached in periodshe is the author of the New Poems, or of Malte, or of the Duino Elegies, or of the Sonnets to Orpheusas if its different phases had little to do with one another, but in fact his writing is a concentrated and evolving exploration of the possibilities of poetic language, a working of the life of words into precise and exacting forms in dialogue with the texture of the world.
The Life of the Work traces that trajectory in a series of close readings that do not neglect the lesser-known, uncollected verse and the poems in French, as well as Rilkes activity as a translator of Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Barrett Browning, Mallarmé, and Valéry, among many others. These encounters were part of Rilkes engagement with the world, his way of extending the reach of his language to get it ever closer to the ungraspable movements, the risk and promise, of life itself. One of his best-known poems ends with the words You must change your life, an injunction that animates the whole of his work.
