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Despite generic and philosophical distinctions, the elegies of Rainer Maria Rilke and Virginia Woolf embody a modernist poetics of insufficiency, one which remains endlessly open to death. Death, The Duino Elegies and novels like Jacob's Room and To the Lighthouse reveal, is both the object, and potentially inexhaustible source, of art. But instead of treating consolation with contempt, as Jahan Ramazani has argued, their modernist elegies emphasize the human desire for recovery and full presence, for transcendence, while offering themselves as proof that art cannot transcend death. This elegiac tension, their poetics's insistence that mourning be without closure, does, nevertheless, contain a poignant and vital sublimity of its own - challenging us not only to grieve differently, but also to see the life around us in formerly unsuspected ways. For these two modernists, then, the elegy constitutes the process of reopening the wound, and the consolation that leaves readers profoundly affected and ultimately dissatisfied.
Keywords: elegy / modernist literature / poetics of insufficiency / Rilke, Rainer Maria (1875-1926) / Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941)
But I now made the contribution of maturity to childhood's intuitions - satiety and doom; the sense of what is inescapable in our lot; death; the knowledge of limitations; how life is more obdurate than one had thought it.
- VIRGINIA WOOLF
THE WAVES
Wir, Vergeuder der Schmerzen.
Wie wir sie absehn voraus, in die traurige Dauer,
ob sie nicht enden vielleicht.
'How we squander our hours of pain.
How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration
to see if they have an end.'
- RAINER MARIA RILKE
"DIE ZEHNTE ELEGIE" / "THE TENTH ELEGY"
The modernist elegy is a poetics of insufficiency.1 With absence, death and the finitude of human existence recognized as insuperable facts, the modernist poetics nevertheless possesses an irrepressible compulsion to give some figure to what has been lost. And while it holds few illusions about the recuperative capacity of art, the modernist elegy self-consciously transforms death and loss, as Jahan Ramazani has said, into "the fuel of poetic mourning" (6). The idea that loss is "the experience from which poetry emerges into being" (Stamelman ix) is certainly not new nor unique to modernist literature. However, the self-consciousness with which elegists like Virginia Woolf and Rainer Maria...