RILKE: A REMINISCENCE
military academy. The military was to him a cliche of the devil; it
was the world become cliche. Thus even his education was without
cliche. I can still see the astonishment on Geheimr.at Bode's military
face when Rilke confessed to him at Duino that he had never read
Hamlet.
That which might be considered aestheticism in his work was
not a lack of greatness but the absence of the cliche of greatness.
Or: his real greatness lay in the unity of form and content. But he
wanted to go beyond that. He wanted to reach a new "greatness"
which, by his nature, he must have conceived of not as the greatness
of the hero, but as the greatness of
mythos.
He too saw in the late
poems of Holderlin the triumph of art over art-a new
mythos
or
the attempt at one. The immortal
Duino Elegies
are an attempt in
this direction: to achieve the triumph of art over
art.
(Translated from the German by Maria Gassler)
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