The life of Rilke-s work is in its words, and this book attends closely to the life unfolding in Rilke-s words over the course of his career. What is a poem, and how does it act upon us as we read? What does reading involve? These are questions of the greatest interest to Rilke, who addresses them in several poems and for whom the experience of reading affords an interaction with the world-a recalibration of our ways of attending to it-whichsets it apart from other kinds of experience. Rilke-s work is often approached in periods-he is the author of the New Poems, or of Malte, or of the Duino Elegies, or of the Sonnets to Orpheus-as if its different phases had little to do with one another, but in fact his writing is a concentrated and evolving exploration ofthe possibilities of poetic language, a working of the life of words into precise and exacting forms in dialogue with the texture of the world.The Life of the Work traces that trajectory in a series of close readings that do not neg
