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Urban Pastoral: Tradition And Innovation In Apollinaire's "Zone" And Rilke's "Zehnte Duineser Elegie", Eleanor E. Ter Horst

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Two early twentieth-century poets, Rainer Maria Rilke and Guillaume Apollinaire, create new relationships to literary traditions and thus reconfigure the meanings of modernity. In Apollinaire's "Zone" and Rilke's "Tenth Duino Elegy," the city represents what is most distincively modern and revolutionary about poetic practice, yet it also provides a link to the literary and historical past. The city in these poems is a site of poetic potentiality, where time is no longer characterized by the rigid separation between past and present, and where space is not geograpically delineated. Through the poets' use of metaphor and apostrophe, which create a suspension …