Duineser Elegien, a cycle of ten elegies in free hymnic verse by Rilke, published in 1923. It is generally reckoned his highest achievement, apart perhaps from the Sonette an Orpheus. The composition of the elegies extended over ten years, which were the most critical of Rilke's inner development. The first two elegies were written in 1912 at the castle of Duino on the Adriatic, from which Rilke took the title for the whole cycle. The third elegy was begun at Duino at the same time, and finished in Paris in 1913. Rilke wrote the fourth, and began the fifth, at Munich in 1915. There then followed a long pause until six more were written in an extraordinary outburst of creativity at Muzot, Switzerland, between 7 and 15 February 1922. The last of these Rilke interpolated as the fifth, substituting it for the fragments of 1915. This outpouring formed part of an astonishing three-week period, in which Part I of the Sonette an Orpheus was written before the elegies, and Part II after.

The first six elegies lament the sorry plight of mortal man in his highest form as artist, and especially in Rilke, with his narcissism and his capacity for self-absorption. The seventh elegy, the first to be composed in the final burst, attempts a solution to the disharmony by transmuting the earth and its objects into art, something which outlasts the maker. Though Rilke did not expressly reject this impermanent extension of existence, grief and lamentation break out, even more despairingly than hitherto, in the eighth elegy. In the ninth Rilke achieves his final resolution of the mortal dilemma by suggesting that the earth and its objects, including man's artefacts, are raised again, insubstantially, in our souls: ‘Erde, ist es nicht dies, was du willst: unsichtbar/in uns erstehn?’ So Rilke's profound despondency is relieved by ‘transforming external realities into invisible inward possessions in life as in death’ (E. L. Stahl).

This highly personal form of perpetuation by ‘inwardness’ (to which Rilke in a letter written in French gave the words ‘transmutation’, ‘resurrection’, and ‘transfiguration’) enabled him to represent in the Elegien a long and arduous striving against the transience of the earth, ending in a personal victory. The last poem allegorically describes the journey into death in terms of mythical landscape. The verse, in which a wide range of imagery, including the well-known, non-theological angels who establish the mythical temper of the Elegien from the outset, is magnificently integrated, attains a consistent sublimity. Though they have been the subject of much speculative interpretation, the Elegien are rather to be understood as an architectonically arranged cycle of hymnic poetry, embodying and proclaiming an intensely felt personal process of experience, than as a metaphysical statement.