SOURCE: Schoolfield, George C. “Hadrian, Antinous, and a Rilke Poem.” In Creative Encounter: Festschrift for Herman Salinger, edited by Leland R. Phelps and A. Tilo Alt, pp. 145-70. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1978.

In the following essay, Schoolfield surveys assorted nineteenth and twentieth century poetic interpretations of Hadrian's relationship with the youth Antinous.

I

The Emperor Hadrian, who is the speaker of Rilke's “Klage um Antinous,” has enjoyed considerable popularity among poets, not least because he belongs to their guild: “Fuit enim poematum et litterarum nimium studiosissimus.” One of his own poems, from the tiny corpus of imperial verse accepted as authentic,¹ has been frequently anthologized and as frequently translated. The famous poem, of course, is Hadrian's “address to his soul,” the “animula vagula blandula,” the companion and guest of the body, the soul, which now is about to go off to some unknown place...