In the Image of Orpheus: Rilke, a Soul History

In his book, In the Image of Orpheus: Rilke, a Soul History, Daniel Polikoff amplifics Rilke's "poetic religion" in the light of Hillman's Archetypal Psychology, Corbin's study of Sufi mysticism, and other essential texts of depth psychology. Polikoff illustrates how Rilke addresses the soulless predicament of modern life-our radical severing from the natural world and the sacred-in the mode of a mystic poet. He works out his relationship to the divine in poetry. God comes to life through the creative imagination of the poet, whose soul comes to life in response. It is this enlivening between the realms that draws so many spiritual seekers to Rilke's opus. The path he creates for himself, which takes him far beyond his native Catholicism into the Russian mysticism of The Book of Hours, the dark night of the soul of the Duino Elegies, and that culminates in the mature, complex, and rich polytheism of the Sonnets to Orpheus, opens a path for us all.