Rilke, Rainer Maria
(1875 - 1926)

The world famous poet from Prague never met Trakl. However, he took his knowledge of him directly from an exchange with Trakl's friend and mentor Ludwig von Ficker.
In letters on this subject in 1915, he formulates some very concise impressions:

Only yesterday evening I found in the envelope (…) Trakl's Helian --, and thanks to you specifically for the transmission. Every beginning and going in this beautiful poem is from an inexpressible sweetness that completely gripped me through its internal distances; it is quasi-assembled on its pauses, a few enclosures around the limitless wordlessness: thus the lines stand there. Like fences in a flat country, over which the fenced continual smashes to an large, unownable plain. (…)
Trakl's figure belongs to the mythical like Linos; instinctively I realize it in the five guises of Helian. It probably does not have to be any more tangible, as it probably was not out of himself…

In the meantime, I received “Sebastian in Dream” and have read much therein: deeply moved, astonishing, foreboding and perplexing; since one soon understands that the conditions of this sounding up and fading away were irretrievably singular, like the circumstances from which just a dream may come. I imagine that even those standing close shall still experience these views and insights as if through a window-pane: since Trakls' experience goes as if in reflections and fills his whole room, which is unenterable, like the room in a mirror. (Who could he have been?)

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