The Rilke Alphabet

“Reading Baer’s elegant prose is a rare pleasure. Baer’s brilliant book The Rilke Alphabet captures the genius of the modern poet and Rilke’s intelligence as a witness of modernity—by employing a dazzling device. Baer presents us twenty-six viewpoints on Rilke’s work, twenty-six perspectives that are vital for anyone who is interested in the poet’s work and in modernism as such. It reads as a real page-turner.”—Amir Eshel, Stanford University

“This book is a cornucopia with presents for the reader—one hardly knows which one to open first. It is an inspiring and rich book that draws its readers in from many surprising sides. Each essay stands on its own, offering a fresh perspective on the life and thought of one of the most celebrated German poets of the twentieth century. And yet the whole is greater than the sum of its parts: a rich portrait of Rilke that enlivens his legacy for a new generation.”—Fritz Breithaupt, Indiana University

“Composed as a series of provocative and richly unfolding essays, Ulrich Baer’s abecedarium occasions fresh encounters with Rilke’s œuvre, not by paving an exit toward transcendent meaning but, on the contrary, by marking crucial words as points of recalcitrance, ensuring that the reader never abandons an immanent, adventurous, and often surprising engagement with the texts.”—John T. Hamilton, Harvard University

“Ulrich Baer has given us a serious jeu d’esprit with rich results: assured entry, after so many have tried without success, into Rilke’s intellectual and poetic world. Baer’s primer, in both senses of the word, is a triumph of the Horatian ideal: a work full of wit and study, pleasure and instruction. It will make every reader strive to fill in the virtual letters between the letters of Baer’s alphabet as doors to open into Rilke.”—Stanley Corngold, Princeton University

“Ulrich Baer’s The Rilke Alphabet consists of twenty-six free-standing essays, each one sending a sort of mine shaft into the densely layered strata of Rilke’s poetry, prose, and letters. Each shaft hits a mother lode of rich, surprising, and at times disturbing insight into not only the poet’s work and life but also into the cultural history in which they were embedded. The essays, organized by way of an idiosyncratic alphabetization of concepts, names, and topics, are partial in the best sense: intensely focused on particular points of access into the poet’s work and life; infused with partiality, a passionate attachment to that ‘partial object’ that is Rilke’s singular voice.”—Eric Santner, University of Chicago

“I know of no more sophisticated attempt to connect the life and work of Rilke for today’s readers. Baer makes himself the champion of the poet’s own insights, upholding them against Rilke’s detractors, enthusiasts, and scholarly interpreters alike. Don’t let the quirky format or the nose-thumbing fool you: this is a work of bracing purpose that all who think they know Rilke should read. Again and again Baer frees Rilke from our ideas about him and gives him back to us afresh.”—William Waters, Boston University