Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion
- T.S. Eliot's East Coker
Both poets understood: if there is some power of goodness which shows up in the making of works of art, it is what compels us to go on reaching for the right words in the right order to give that goodness some flimsy hold on life.
Rilke: The Last Inward Man, by Lesley Chamberlain pg 15
Musil then proposed two categories of poem, to help us understand where to place Rilke. There are poems that ‘in a fixed world can heal or complete something in us; ornament our world, boost our feelings, let something new escape or begin… and there are poems that can’t forget the uneasiness, the inconstancy and the fragmentariness hidden in existence as a whole’.
Rilke: The Last Inward Man, by Lesley Chamberlain pg 27
Mark Carrigan 