RAINER MARIA RILKE

PRroOSE

Stories of God tr. Nora Purtscher-Wydenbruck and
Hester Norton (Sidgwick and Jackson).

The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge tr. John Linton
(Hogarth Press).

Selected Letters tr. R. F. C. Hull (Macmillan; in the
press, to appear Spring 1945).

The Stories of God are of no great significance, but Malte
Laurids Brigge is a work of genius. The publication of a com-
prehensive selection of the poet’s letters in translation (only the
first, one hopes, of many) will clearly be an event of the first
importance for a proper understanding of Rilke in England.

II. CrrTicisMm OF RILKE

Rainer Maria Rilke by E. M. Butler (Cambridge Uni-
versity Press).

A full-length critical biography; accurate, if acidulous.
Professor Butler’s German scholarship is beyond question, but
she does not like Rilke, and lets us know it. The book contains
some remarkably fine literary criticism, particularly of the
Sonnets to Orpheus, and some passages which shew a lamentable
lack of taste.

Rainer Maria Rilke : Aspects of his Mind and Poetry, four
essays by G. Craig Houston, William Rose, C. M.
Bowra and E. L. Stahl (Sidgwick and Jackson).

These essays, by acknowledged experts, are all extremely
illuminating, but the book is intended for the reader with more
than a little German, since there are frequent (and occasionally
very difficult) German citations. Even so, it remains the best
introduction to the poet in English, apart from Leishman’s
excellent but rather scattered explanatory passages.

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