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Revised edition 2023

Paperback – 145 x 115 mm – 96 pages

15 pages of illustrations

ISBN 9781843680314

Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) was already an old man when the young poet Rainer Maria Rilke went to interview him for the first time. Rilke stayed on to work as Rodin’s secretary. Intensely sensitive to art, and in particular to the irreducible power of objects, and yet able to express this awareness in prose of great lyricism and clarity, Rilke was destined to be the critic who would most naturally dramatise Rodin’s work. In 1903, Rilke published his essay Rodin, a sustained and profound meditation on the unique power of Rodin’s sculpture that has never been equalled. Written around a chronology of Rodin’s work, it is also a very approachable introduction to some of the greatest sculpture of the 19th-century.

Raine Maria Rilke’s essay on Rodin went on to achieve great fame in Germany, selling many tens of thousands of copies during his lifetime. Poet and art critic, he is probably best known for his great lyric sequences, the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus.

Jessie Lemont (1872-1947) was a American poet who gave a series of lectures on Rodin in America upon her return from her visits to Rodin in 1908, 1909 and 1910. She translated Rilke’s essay with her husband Hans Trausil.

An introduction by Dr Alexandra Parigoris, who is Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Fine Art, History of Art, and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds, and a member of the Conseil Scientifique of the Musée Rodin, Paris, puts this important work in the context of Rodin’s sculpture and his connections with Rilke and Lemont. It assesses as well the value that Rilke’s appreciation of Rodin has today.