eliot on duino elegies (slightly gr-related)

[lorentzen-nicklaus]

 ... a couple of days ago i found in a second-hand bookstore a copy of an 
essay-collection (in german) of t.s. eliot, which contains texts about the 
notion of "classic", on dante & on goethe. in this last mentioned one, "goethe 
der weise" [1955], eliot says about rilke's duino elegies (p. 153, own 
re-translation): "for me it would, basically, be enough to enjoy the words' 
beauty, to let myself get moved by the music of the lines, and i have to force 
myself to make at least the effort to enter ways of thought that are to me not 
only difficult but also strange" ... interestingly enough, the guy who read the 
book before me, he wrote at the margin "naja, dann eben nicht" which roughly 
translates into "oh well,then just forget about it!" ... my reaction on eliot's 
statement about the duino elegies is, however, quite different ... it's the 
greatest compliment one can make to a work of art ... that the art in itself is 
so beautiful and/or sublime that one wants to stay with it and not avoid 
intimacy by escaping into context-information ... it's the song, not the singer 
...

 
kfl