SOURCE: “From Buddha to Orpheus: Rainer Maria Rilke's Quest for Internal Relations,” in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. LXXIII, No. 1, Spring, 1990, pp. 149-67.

In the following essay, Doud investigates correspondences between Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry and Whitehead's metaphysics.

As early as The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge it had been the concern of Rainer Maria Rilke to distinguish between authentic death and inauthentic death (1985,9-16). How we die is the quintessential human question. To die a death of one's own is to have lived a life of one's own. To die merely clinically after a life devoid of originality and empty of the struggle to realize one's uniqueness is the ultimate failure. In his poem “Requiem” (1982, 73-87) Rilke chastizes the gifted painter, Paula Becker, for having failed to die her own death. It is not her passing in itself that is mourned, but her refusal to authenticate her...