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Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> So Wordsworth had written. But no one could say that Rilke’s heart lived alone. He was indeed a Santa Claus bringing to himself and to his readers the wonderfully and meticulously tentative feeling for things the exploration of things of which his poetry has the secret. And never more so than in the two parts of the Neue Gedichte the poems in which Rilke’s peculiar genius first unmistakably showed itself. His own kind of solitude was indeed the condition for the creation of Rilke’s art. Out of that solitary condition he brings us a unique social and shared offering. In a very special sense he seems to live with us as sentient and sensitive human beings in his own kind of intimacy as if ‘the things’ blessed us as well as him. The inwardness the belonging togetherness of this (in German the Zusammengeh?rigkeitsgef?hl) has special quality which irritates some readers and perhaps particularly irritates other and different kinds of poet. ‘Rilke was a jerk’ wrote John Berryman in one of his Dream Songs. All this really means is that the tone of Rilke’s gentle questing intimacy is quite different from that much less easy much more self-conscious one trailed before us by the fiercely competitive American poet. All poets can do harm to their fellow men and women in their own way; although Berryman subscribed as conscientiously as Auden or as Wordsworth himself to the doctrine of our needs and duties – ‘the human heart by which we live’ – he created social and marital havoc on a scale which makes Rilke’s with- drawal from the usual demands of love and marriage seem – as indeed it was – a scrupulous necessity for his survival as a poet a way of exercising his own sort of moral humanity. Rilke remained deeply attached to his wife and daughter in spite of the fact that he could no and did not live with them and was always anxious (LL)