RE: gary lane, 'the duino elegies', death haiku

--- Yocum Daniel GS 21 CES/CEOE
<daniel.yocum@Peterson.af.mil> wrote:
> Maybe Salinger associates Rilke with profound pain
> and strong emotional
> memory of death since he discovered him in Europe
> during his recuperation
> from battle fatigue(as far as my limited knowledge)
> so when He wrote
> Bananafish, that was the poetry he associated
> strongly with his depression
> or broken faculties after the war. From the little
> I know about literary
> criticism, which is nothing, it seems to me the
> pschological motivation for
> Seymour's sucide might have changed with Salinger's
> changing world view or
> rather his exposure to eastern thought. But
> apparently from the post today
> he never forgot Rilke's inspirational influnce
> conscious or otherwise.
>
>
daniel,

i very much like your post.
i'm not sure if it is known exactly when salinger
discovered rilke's work. rilke is mentioned by name
in 'the stranger' which dates, i think, from 1945. and
it is a fact that norton publishing company in america
started to publish a slew of rilke books starting in
1938 all the way through '47 or '48 (this included the
celebrated leishman & spender translation of 'the
duino elegies' in 1939). i can't help but think that
jds eagerly sought out each new norton book as it
appeared during those ten years. and if one can trust
a bookseller on abebooks.com, salinger enrolled in a
writing course in the spring of '39 at columbia from
the poet charles hanson towne--the dealer has an
inscribed book by towne ('an april song') to jds with
reference to that course; i'm guessing a poetry
writing class (though it's not specified). it is
known that during the war salinger bombarded louise
bogan with poems for possible publication in 'the new
yorker'. as i said in my other post, the motif of
poetry is very strong in salinger's work and continues
to be such even as the eastern influences accrue over
the years. and of course the very fact that he makes
his central character, seymour glass, in addition to
being a blue-striped unicorn and ringding enlightened
man, a poet of the first rank.

kim

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Received on Wed Sep 25 17:09:43 2002