Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.15291/gem.3060
Lyric Poetry from the „Third Place“ - On Rainer Maria Rilke’s Florence Poems (1898)
Erich Unglaub
; Technical University of Braunschweig
Abstract
Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry from 1898 is not held in high esteem by connoisseurs. Scholars focus rather on the ‘Florence Diary’, published posthumously in 1942. As a journal from an educational trip to Florence and Viareggio in the spring of 1898, it records visits to Renaissance artworks, great collections and famous churches, but it does not contain any poetical and lyrical traces. Nevertheless, poems do emerge but their motifs deviate from picturesque vedutas and classical forms; their objects are neither the great examples of art nor the everyday world of tourists but they rather moves to so-called ‘third places’, topographically recognizable in the city periphery and surrounding landscapes as well as the choice of ordinary people as poetic characters, insignificant young girls on their pilgrimage to sacred sites of the
Madonna, and remote rituals of popular religion. From these ‘new’ contexts Rilke tries to create a poetry and poetics of his own, which contrasts with the epigonal style of poetry on Italy from central and northern Europe.
Keywords
non-place; anthropological place; third place; landscape; girls; Madonna; threshold
Hrčak ID:
241768
URI
Publication date:
28.7.2020.
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