Word: duino
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...years before World War I, at Castle Duino in Austria, he was brusquely, briefly seized by inspiration of a blinding ferocity. While it held him he began those Duino Elegies which he thenceforth regarded as the crowning work of his life. But with the war, apathy shut over him. "A born noncombatant," he mainly vegetated in Munich, more & more dependent on the friendship of ladies, writing letters (TIME, June 10, 1940) which combine elegance with self-pity. In the War Ministry, his job was to rule lines on to pay-sheets, "a duty he discharged with meticulous neatness, clad...
...letters of the three years following the war are a record of slow convalescence. In them it becomes clear that the years of silence, of daily absorption in horror, despair and death, contributed incalculably to those continuously illuminated days in 1922 during which Rilke completed the Duino Elegies, those poems through which he felt his existence had been justified...