While the poets Hölderlin and Rilke are often evoked together in a common thematic context, they have invited little direct comparison in literary scholarship. Yet as demonstrated in this essay, the poetics and poetry of Hölderlin and Rilke are connected by the common notion of distinctly poetic consciousness and by their efforts to figure the relation of poetic consciousness to nature. It is...
The inner life rendered as exotic space reflects the modern subject’s sense of self, recognizing primal forces within. The aesthetic imagination, mystical-erotic reverie, and the interior experiences of dreams in works by Gottfried Benn, Robert Musil, and Alfred Kubin engage exotic topographical imagery, where writers undermine the Enlightenment model of a rationally unified self and to explore...