1. Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke, by Ralph Freedman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995, 129.
2. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1941; reprinted by Octagon Books, New York: Octagon Books Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971. More recently (1988), Peter Lang has published Beatrice Bullock-Kimball’s monograph, The European Heritage of Rose Symbolism and Rose Metaphors in View of Rilke’s Epitaph.
3. Capri, ca. New Year’s Day 1907.
4. Paris, June 27, 1906.
5. My Sister, My Spouse: A Biography of Lou Andreas-Salomié. New York: Norton and Co., 1962, new ed. 1974, 186, 270.
6. New York: Fromm Intl., 1984, 73.
7. Rilke: A Life, by Wolfgang Leppmann. New York: Fromm International, 1984, 75.
8. Freedman, Life of a Poet, 113.
9. Quoted by H. F. Peters in Rainer Maria Rilke: Masks and the Man. Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1960. Reprinted by Gordian Press, NY, 1977, 10.
10. Freedman, Life of a Poet, 373.
11. “Parting,” Paris, early 1906.
12. From “The Book of Poverty and Death,” which is Book III of The Book of Hours, 1903.
13. From “Turning-Point,” Paris, 1914.
14. “Autumn,” Paris, Sept. 11, 1902.
15. “Autumn Day,” Paris, Sept. 21, 1902.
16. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.
17. “To Music,” a gift to Frau Hanna Wolff after a private concert at her home, Munich, Jan. 11 or 12, 1918.
18. “The Lace,” II, Capri, ca. Feb. 10, 1907.
19. “Buddha,” Meudon, end of 1905.
20. Phases of Rilke, Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1958, 72.
21. The Romantic Rebellion, New York: Harper and Row, 1973, 353, 4.
22. “The Panther,” Jardin des Plantes, Paris, 1903.
23. From “The Fourth Elegy.”
24. Last entry in Rilke’s pocket book, Val-Mont, Switzerland, mid-December 1926.
1. Meudon, Winter 1905–6.
2. See Michael Hamburger’s “Brief Afterthoughts on Versions of a Poem by Hölderlin,” in Translating Poetry, edited by Daniel Weissbort. Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1989, 51–6.
3. Rilke’s Book of Hours, 111.
4. II.7 of “The Book of Pilgrimage” from The Book of Hours.
1. Reprinted in the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature VII, no. 2, 1980, 163–73.
2. Arndt, The Best of Rilke, 162.
3. Sonnets to Orpheus, Part I, 3, Muzot, Feb. 2–5, 1922.
4. Sonnets to Orpheus, Part I, 1, Muzot, Feb. 2–5, 1922.
5. Sonnets to Orpheus, Part I, 2, Muzot, Feb. 2–5, 1922.
6. Sonnets to Orpheus, Part II, 13, Muzot, Feb. 15–17, 1922.
7. Vol. 2, Poetry, 143.
8. “Torso of an Archaic Apollo,” Paris, early Summer 1908, in New Poems, Part II.
1. The Poems of Alexander Pope, a one-volume edition of the Twickenham text, edited by John Butt. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1963, 265.
2. “Lament,” Paris, July 1914.
3. From “The Ninth Elegy.”
4. “The Spanish Trilogy,” I, Ronda, Jan. 6, 1913.
5. Quotations are from “Mathematical Creation,” in The Creative Process, edited by Brewster Ghiselin. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1952, 33–42.
6. “The Great Night,” Paris, 1914.
1. Freedman, Life of a Poet, 155.
2. Paula Modersohn-Becker, by Gillian Perry. New York: Harper & Row, 1979, 126, plate xvi.
3. Freedman, Life of a Poet, 266.
4. Paula Modersohn-Becker, The Letters and Journals, Günter Busch and Liselette von Reinken, eds.; Arthur S. Wensinger and Carole Clew Hoey, trans. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1990, 195.
5. From “Requiem for a Friend.”
6. Modersohn-Becker, Letters and Journals, 539.
7. Ibid., 540.
8. Freedman, Life of a Poet, 254.
9. Paris, Oct. 31–Nov. 2, 1908.
1. “Primal Sound,” in G. Craig Houston, trans., Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Works, vol. I, Prose, 51–6.
2. Quoted in My European Heritage, by Brigitte B. Fischer. Boston: Brandon Publishing, 1986, 76.
3. Sonnets to Orpheus, Part II, 1, Feb. 23, 1921.
4. Sonnets to Orpheus, Part II, 29, Feb. 19–23.
5. From “The Ninth Elegy.”
6. From “The First Elegy.”
7. London: Chatto and Windus, 1972.
8. Sonnets to Orpheus, Part II, 12, Muzot, Feb. 15–17, 1922.
9. Paris, mid-July 1906.
10. Rilke, in a letter to Hermann Pongs, quoted by Leppmann, 183.
11. From “The Fifth Elegy.”
12. From “The Fourth Elegy.”
13. Sonnets to Orpheus, Part I, 13.
14. “Transformations,” quoted by Martin Seymour Smith in Hardy. London: Bloomsbury, 1994, 31.
15. From “The Fourth Elegy.”
16. Paris, June 20, 1914.
17. From “The Ninth Elegy.”
18. Sonnets to Orpheus, Part II, 29.
19. Greene and Norton, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, vol. 2, 1910–26, 139–40.
20. “Death,” Munich, November 9, 1915.
21. From “The Seventh Elegy.”
1. “Oh sage, Dichter, was du tust?” December 1921. Inscribed in a copy of Malte Laurids Brigge belonging to Leonie Zacharias.
2. “Man Must Die Because He Has Known Them” from the sayings of Ptahhotep, ms. from ca. 2000 B.C. Paris, July 1914.
3. Norton: New York, 1975.
4. In The Classical German Elegy 1795–1950, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980, 242.
5. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1956, 295–333.
6. “Puppet Theater,” Paris, July 20, 1907.
7. Sonnets to Orpheus, Part I, 5, Muzot, Feb. 2–5, 1921.
8. Quoted by Mitchell in the excellent notes to his translation, The Sonnets to Orpheus, 164.
9. Sonnets to Orpheus, Part I, 15, Muzot, Feb. 2–5, 1921.
1. Schloss Duino, Jan. 21, 1912.
2. Schloss Duino, late Jan.–early Feb. 1912.
3. Begun at Schloss Duino early in 1912; continued and completed in Paris, late Autumn 1913.
4. Munich, Nov. 22 and 23, 1915.
5. Château de Muzot, Sierre, Switzerland, Feb. 14, 1922.
6. Lines 1–31, Ronda, Spain, Jan.–Feb. 1913; lines 42–44, Paris, late Autumn 1913; lines 32–41, Château de Muzot, Feb. 9, 1922.
7. Château de Muzot, Feb. 7, 1922.
8. Château de Muzot, Feb. 7–8, 1922.
9. The first six lines, Schloss Duino, March 1912; the remainder, Château de Muzot, Feb. 9, 1922.
10. Lines 1–12 at Schloss Duino, Jan.–Feb. 1912; continued in Paris during late Autumn 1913; a new conclusion, lines 13 to the end, at Château de Muzot, Feb. 11, 1922.