On Inwardness and Place in Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus

Abstract

Rilke’s poetry can be read, under the influence of Heidegger, as entangled in the philosophy of subjectivity inaugurated by Descartes and brought to completion in the writings of Nietzsche, and so, by implication, belonging to a tradition to be overcome. The Sonnets occasionally appeal to human subjectivity as a creative source of the world’s being and meaning, but they also contest modern assumptions about subjectivity, and in ways that invite comparison with Heidegger’s own ambition to locate sources of significance beyond the Cartesian subject. This becomes especially palpable when one focuses on Rilke’s use of the language of space and place. The present chapter explores Rilke’s views on interiority and romantic inwardness and argues, against the grain of Heidegger’s interpretation, that the Sonnets develop a set of topological insights into the nonsubjective sources or places of human significance and the roots of an affirmative way of inhabiting the world.