Rilke considered the Elegies his greatest achievement. Begun in 1912 at the castle of Duino near Trieste, these ten Elegies were finally completed after a decade of sporadic and protracted creation, in the winter of 1922. They are part of the same creative vein from which erupted, spontaneously and in far briefer time, the Sonnets to Orpheus.

As MacIntyre suggests, these elegies "indubitably . . . will take their place among the great and unforgettable poetry of the world." They have already been singled out critically as "the most impresive sequence of great poetry in modern European literature."

In this compact volume, the German original text is printed face to face with the translations.