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The Modernism of The Sonnets to Orpheus

Although Rilke does not fit neatly within any of the movements that made up European modernism, he nonetheless takes up the problems they identified and articulated: problems of the human relation to the world; the meaning of that world and the things in it; the potential loss of meaning in the face of various modes of alienation; the roots of alienation in objectifying modes of thought or the monumental shifts occasioned by technological advances; and the confrontation with human mortality and finitude in the absence of meaning-granting institutions. This essay argues that Rilke’s engagement with the visual arts offers some his most direct statements of how aesthetic making responds to these problems prior to demonstrating that The Sonnets to Orpheus are Rilke’s poetic working-through of how both the themes and specific language-use of poetry might help salvage world relations threatened by a stance of technological mastery and reduction to use value.