ABSTRACT
After the turning, Rilke was spiritually capable of continuing, indeed of completing, something he had started, which as yet had no shape: the work which came to be known as the Duino Elegies. He had begun these in 1912 at Castle Duino on the Adriatic coast, the home of a patroness, Princess Marie Thurn-und-Taxis-Hohenloe, one of Europe’s richest women. The war would interrupt him. After the war, he continued to work and parts of the Elegies, as he was calling them, came in fits and spurts. But in February 1922, at Château Muzot, his borrowed home in Switzerland, he finished the 10 Elegies and 55 Sonnets to Orpheus. One of the greatest poetic achievements of the twentieth century was born into the world.
