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.