Alison writes:
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He could not have written them without, paradoxically, an unusual sense of
control over his medium, which the idea of inspiration tends to gloss. The
Elegies are totally astounding poems.
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I can only agree with your last sentence. What I don't know about the
Elegies is how many times he sat down and tried to write them, how much
thinking and working out he did, before that extraordinary burst of energy
in which he concluded them and wrote the Sonnets. My feeling is that a lot
of the thinking in creativity takes place at a level one is not fully
conscious of, and that seems to be the point of Rilke's story about how the
first line came to him when he was pacing the battlements thinking about a
letter he had to write. (May not have remembered this quite accurately.)
Certainly the approach is very different from that of the New Poems - he
didn't have a set subject and set form out there in the world - and the
result is that much less definable flow of energies you describe. (How could
you plan that? You could only prepare yourself to be ready to control it
when and if it arrived.) He seems to me an archetypal modern poet, in that
he contains the poles between which we all have to move, out there vs in
here, constraints vs organic form, abstraction vs concreteness etc.
Best wishes
Matthew
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