Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1923. First edition, ordinary issue, of Rilke's Duino Elegies. Presentation copy, inscribed on the half-title to the Swiss sculptor Hermann Haller in August 1924, with an inscription which includes an apparently unpublished, rather hermetic, two-stanza poem on the life of the artist in Rilke's hand, dated Muzot 1924, and signed in full by the poet. The poem reads: "Unser ist das Wunder vom geballten / Wasser, das der Magier vollbracht, / Welche Freude, welche Macht, / Leben, das dahinstuerzt, aufzuhalten! / Aber freilich: als bemuehteUeber / sind wir doch nicht Herren der Gewalten; / denn nun reissen sie uns dort hinueber, / und wir stuerzen still in die Gestallten." The ten Duino Elegies, along with The Sonnets to Orpheus, comprise the basis of Rilke's stature as one of the indisputably great poets of the Twentieth Century, perhaps the greatest. (T. S. Eliot, Osip Mandelstam, and Zbigniew Herbert, would be his only rivals for this distinction, if such a distinction were verifiable, which it is not.). The story of the creation of the Elegies has long since passed into legend: The first words came to Rilke on a violent sea wind, as he walked on the cliffs near Duino..... More