Rainer Maria. Sonette an Orpheus.

by RILKE

£2,250 · Offered by Henry Sotheran Ltd

RILKE, Rainer Maria. Sonette an Orpheus. Leipzig: Im Insel-Verlag. 1923. 8vo. Original marbled paper-covered boards, green paper inlay lettered and framed in gilt to front board; pp. 63, [1]; light rubbing to extremities of boards, mild spotting and staining throughout (though less than usual with this volume), wrapper a touch frayed to upper edge of front panel; a near fine copy, in like dustwrapper; contemporary pencilled inscription to the title page preceding the Part I: “In memoriam Hiddensee. / R. B. / September 1923” ( see below ). An uncommonly bright, sharp copy of the first edition of Rilke’s swan song, in a startlingly fresh example of the scarce dustwrapper, and with an intriguing contemporary inscription. Rilke’s sequence of fifty-five Sonnets to Orpheus came as a late and unexpected flowering after a period during which the poet was unable to write. “These strange Sonnets,” Rilke wrote in the year of publication, “were not intended or expected; they appeared […]. I could do nothing but surrender, purely and obediently, to the dictation of this inner impulse.” He had begun writing the Duino Elegies in 1912, but a combination of private and personal circumstance (the approaching war uppermost) led to a depressive illness which postponed their completion for nearly a decade. In 1921, Werner Reinhart invited Rilke to stay at the Château de Muzot near Veyras in the Rhone Valley, and it was there that news arrived of the premature death of Wera Knoop, (1902–21), daugh

• Binding: Hardcover

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