ABSTRACT

Rainer Maria Rilke's first complete collection, Leben wit Lieder (1894), displays all the hallmarks of the juvenile style that has encouraged such a dismissive critical consensus on his 'Fruhwerk'. Not only do the themes and images of this juvenilia anticipate subsequent developments, but also its very rhythm and syntax reveal, in embryonic, narcissistic form, the obsession with processes of development that wall determine his subsequent poetry. Rilke's next three collections follow largely the same pattern, drawing from the same palette of very limited themes and concerns, marred by the inevitability of much of the metre and syntax. Advent, consisting of poems composed over the course of 1896 and 1897, emerged into print at Christmas 1897, as the title indicates. Rilke's other main perspective on processes of growth in these early years is overwhelmingly female, perhaps there is a natural connection between organic imagery and flowering young maidens.