Being Here is Glorious: On Rilke, Poetry, and Philosophy

With a new translation of the Duino Elegies

“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’/orders?” Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies opens with one of the most powerful poetic expressions of the search for meaning in the modern world. Published in 1923, the Elegies would influence important philosophers on the Continent, including Heidegger. But with a few exceptions, Rilke’s poetry has not had an impact on philosophy in the Anglo-American world. In Being Here Is Glorious, James D. Reid offers a fresh translation of the Elegies, which hews to the form of the original and provides his own meditation on the place of poetry in philosophy. Reid makes a convincing case that poetry and philosophy can address the problem of finding things significant and worth affirming in light of various reasons to doubt the value of the world in which we find ourselves cast.

RAINER MARIA RILKE (1875–1926) is considered one of the German language’s greatest twentieth-century poets. Among other works, he wrote Letters to a Young Poet, The Sonnets to Orpheus, and the novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Editions of Rilke’s Letters on God and Letters to a Young Woman, The Book of Hours: Prayers to a Lowly God, Duino Elegies, and New Poems are published by Northwestern University Press.

JAMES D. REID is an associate professor of philosophy at the Metropolitan State University of Denver. He has written on the philosophical legacies of Kant, Fichte, Dilthey, and Heidegger, among others. He coedited Thoreau’s Importance for Philosophy (2012).