While Rilke's poetry is well known to English-speaking audiences through numerous translations, his writings on art are less frequently acknowledged. Rilke himself, who tended to play down literary influences on his work, referred regularly and enthusiastically to the inspiration he had found in visual art. In the decades around 1900 it was not uncommon for German-speaking writers to take an interest in the visual arts. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Hermann Bahr, Eduard von Keyserling and Rudolf Borchardt were amongst those who took up a tradition already well established in France, and combined writing about art with a literary career. Rilke went further than any other German writer in using ideas from the visual and plastic arts to shape his poetry. The years between his first long stay with the artists of Worpswede in 1900 and his excitement about Cézanne in 1907 mark a continuous development in his understanding of the visual and his ideas about artistic form. The three longer pieces of art criticism (on Worpswede, Rodin and Cézanne) which he produced in this period represent distinct stages in this development, while the two volumes of New Poems published in 1907 and 1908 contain the results of his reflections on the relationship between poetry and visual art, and on the potential of painting and sculpture to provide models for a linguistic art form.

Worpswede was not the first focus of Rilke's interest in art. In the second half of the 1890s he had studied art history, albeit somewhat half-heartedly, in Prague, Munich and Berlin, while rather more enthusiastically following the latest developments in the German art scene.

“As for myself, Galba, Otho, and Vitellius were not known to me through doing me either good or harm. I would not deny that my career owed its beginnings to Vespasian, its advance to Titus and its further progress to Domitian; but those who have promised to be unbiased must describe everyone without either affection or hatred. If I live long enough, I have reserved for my old age the richer and less troublesome material of the principate of the deified Nerva and the rule of Trajan, in this rare delight of the times when you can think what you like and say what you think.” (H. 1.1.3-4) / “Soon it was our hands that led Helvidius to prison; it was we who were shamed by the looks and the sight of Mauricus and Rusticus; it was we who were drenched by Senecio's innocent blood. Nero would at least remove his own eyes from such sights, and he ordered rather than viewed his crimes; it was a special part of the suffering under Domitian to see and be seen, when our sighs were noted down, when that savage, red face with which he fortified himself against shame was sufficient to mark out the pallor of so many men.” (Agr. 45.1-2) / “There was also the death of Junia, in the sixty-fourth year after the fighting at Philippi. She was the niece of Cato, the wife of C. Cassius and the sister of M. Brutus. Her will produced much talk among the people, because she was a wealthy woman and she mentioned in complimentary terms virtually all the leading men of the state, but made no mention of the emperor. That was taken in a way appropriate to a fellow-citizen, and Tiberius did not forbid the funeral to be celebrated with the eulogy from the front of the rostra and the other customary honours. Twenty funeral-masks of the most distinguished families were carried before the bier, and the names of Manlii and Quinctii and other similar nobility were to be seen. But the most glittering of all were Cassius and Brutus, for the very reason that their likenesses were not on view.” (A. 3.76)

“Tacitus had provocatively opened the Annals with Augustus' death.” / In undertaking his history Ab excessu Diui Augusti - now commonly known as Annals - Tacitus faced the problem of where and how to begin. The earlier Histories open with the consuls of 69, and much has been written on the importance of this timing for Tacitus' historiographical aims. In particular, electing to start not with the death of Nero but with the magistrate year establishes a thematic dissonance between the forthcoming narrative of the principates of Galba through Domitian and the traditional means of recording Roman history, which was structured by annual consular dating. But the choice of annalistic format did not oblige Tacitus to begin with 1 January: previous annalistic history had accommodated the different calendars of the Republican year, and events could easily take precedence over the calendar. So Livy elects to use the sack of Rome by the Gauls as the dividing point between his Books 5 and 6; and, though the move from monarchy to Republic is marked by the establishment of consular elections (1.60.3; 2.1.7), he is interested more in the process of change than in the time of year, more in the annual nature of the offices than in any particular annus or part thereof.

Rainer Maria Rilke's vast correspondence touches upon the full range of topics addressed in his poetry and prose. In what amounts to approximately 17,000 letters (not all of them yet published due to copyright restrictions with addressees), Rilke sometimes abandoned the constraints of German verse, and occasionally syntax, to produce powerful and surprisingly accessible meditations on life, art, death, religion, love and politics. Rilke wrote to housekeepers and politicians, fellow poets and lovers, teenage girls infatuated with his verse and, though rarely, to critics who had engaged with his work. The only criterion for inclusion in Rilke's little black book, where he meticulously kept track of all his correspondence (at the end of his life, it contained several hundred entries with notes on every letter written and received), was that a letter, even from an unknown individual or someone of far lower social standing, 'spoke to him'. Rilke took each word in every letter seriously, as can be gleaned from the immaculate way he covered pages and pages of stationery with his prose. A little over a year before his death in a Swiss sanatorium, Rilke stipulated in October 1925 that his letters ought to be published alongside his other writings: 'Since for now several years I have had the custom to channel part of the productivity of my nature into writing letters, there exist no obstacles to publishing my correspondence [ . . . ] (should my publisher Insel Verlag make such a suggestion)' (Briefe, II, 1192). Given the profundity of thought expressed in his letters and Rilke's own high estimation of these missives, it is virtually impossible to gain a full understanding of the poet without taking the correspondence into account.

When considering Rilke's reception of the various literatures, ancient and modern, that were so familiar to him, we should expect a process of thoroughgoing assimilation and interiorisation rather than one of borrowing and imitation. A poem from The Book of Images, 'The Man Reading', shows how for Rilke the process of reading opens out the self, dissolving both the antitheses and contradictions of the external world and those between inner and outer life such that 'there outside' matches 'what I am living within' ('Dort drauben ist, was ich hier drinnen lebe', KA I, 332). The incommensurability of existence ceases to be disconcerting to the individual experiencing it, who mysteriously feels more interwoven with it than ever. The act of reading is an act of self-discovery rather than a process of collecting data about someone, something or somewhere else.

The next poem in the collection is called 'The Man Looking', clearly intended to function as a partner to 'The Man Reading'. Both open with an evocation of tempestuous weather, the storm in the second 'a transformer' ('ein Umgestalter') rendering the natural world it touches ageless, the landscape 'like a verse in the Psalter', likening the visual to the verbal. Reading and seeing were not as distinct for Rilke as might be expected. He will have been more than aware of the dual aspect of the word 'Bild' - as in the title of the collection, Buch der Bilder - which can be translated as 'picture' or 'image', the former anchored in the visual world, the latter also used of verbal constructs.

In 1882, in the pages of the widely read journal, the Nineteenth Century, Matthew Arnold (1822-88), poet, essayist and social and literary critic, took the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95) to task for his views on the ingredients of a proper education. Arnold rejected Huxley's proposal 'to make the training in natural science the main part of education, for the great majority of mankind at any rate'. Scientific knowledge, Arnold declared, was unable put us 'into relation with our sense for conduct, our sense for beauty'. The moral and aesthetic impulses were essential to human beings because of our very nature. If science could not fulfil basic human needs, then, Arnold argued, we must turn to another body of learning as the foundation of education: classical language and literature. As befits a graduate of Oxford, Arnold defended the value of 'knowing the Greeks and Romans, and their life and genius, and what they were and did in the world'. He maintained that the 'instinct for beauty' and the 'instinct for conduct' were served by classical literature 'as it is served by no other literature'. From Arnold's perspective, Huxley's science-based conception of education was impoverished.

In the past, Arnold's trenchant criticisms of Huxley have often been read as evidence of a rupture between science and literature continuing into the twentieth century, most poignantly expressed by C. P. Snow in his The Two Cultures (1959). But does the debate between Huxley and Arnold in the early 1880s really mark the origins of a cultural divide between scientists and literary intellectuals?

Edward Gibbon (1737-94) is today not often read as a 'colleague' by professional historians of Roman or Byzantine history. He is read rather, if at all, as a 'classic' of English literature, of which he is unquestionably an ornament. His luminous and eminently parodiable style has not pleased all his readers equally, however. But its intricate subtleties demonstrate time and again the truth both of Buffon's adage that 'le style c'est l'homme même' and of A.D. Momigliano's mantra that a history - any history - cannot be understood apart from the historian who composed it. Gibbon was besides an outstanding Latinist, and did not merely parade but made consistently excellent practical use of his 'seraglio' (his personal library) of 6,000-7,000 volumes. Though judged weak in source-criticism by the highest contemporary standards applied at Göttingen, Gibbon more than justifies the place he claimed - with David Hume (for some others, the first truly modern historian) and William Robertson - among the triumvirate of leading English-language historians of the second half of the eighteenth century.

The Agricola's first words, echoing the opening of Cato the Elder's Origines (fr. 2P = 2C), are as follows: 'to record for posterity famous men's deeds and characters is an ancient practice not abandoned even in our times' (1.1). There used to be no criticism, even of those who wrote their own Life; 'but now, about to relate a dead man's life, I have needed indulgence, which I should not have sought if planning an invective, so savage and hostile to excellence are the times [infesta uirtutibus tempora]' (1.4). The end of this sentence echoes Cicero's complaint in 46 BC (Orat. 35 tempora . . . inimica uirtuti). Tacitus then recalls how Arulenus Rusticus' Life of Thrasea Paetus, and that of Helvidius Priscus by Herennius Senecio, had resulted in the death penalty for their authors and in their books being burned (2.1). Tacitus did not need to specify that Thrasea and Priscus were senators and Stoics, who had met their deaths for 'opposition'. The fate of Rusticus, Senecio and others, condemned in 93, would be taken up again just before the end of the work (45.1), but for the moment Tacitus continues: 'No doubt they thought that in that fire the voice of the Roman people, the liberty of the senate and the conscience of mankind had been wiped out, since in addition the teachers of philosophy [sapientiae professoribus] had been expelled and all noble accomplishments driven into exile, so that nothing honourable might anywhere confront them' (2.2). Whereas 'the former age [uetus aetas] witnessed an extreme of freedom, we have experienced the depth of servitude' (2.3).

'Dead', Charles Dickens's narrator says after the demise of Jo the Crossing Sweeper in Bleak House (1852-3) and 'dying thus all around us, every day'. Dickens helped make Victorian death seem like a way of life. His celebrated death scenes - Jo, Paul in Dombey and Son (1846-8), Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1) - assisted in propelling the notion of a Victorian 'sentimental' investment in death. For many decades afterwards, the Victorians have seemed to have had a peculiarly intimate relationship with, even a readiness to celebrate, mourning. The major new cemeteries - Highgate and Kensal Green, for instance, or the cemeteries of Birmingham, Leeds and Sheffield - were solemn but strangely to be enjoyed. Queen Victoria, losing Prince Albert in 1861 (perhaps to stomach cancer finished off by pneumonia or typhoid) retreated into grief. A Queen in mourning, she seemed to preside symptomatically over a culture - with its new great burial sites, notorious infant mortality rates, industrial accidents, stark gaps between rich and poor and elaborate rituals of the grave - that knew death more familiarly than any modern period. It was an age of elegy. The Queen's favourite Laureate, Alfred Tennyson, was best known for In Memoriam (1850), his lament on the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam. Even the first postage stamp was black.

What, one wonders, was in the history section of Tacitus' library? At the core of the Greek section, we may safely assume, would reside Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon, with Polybius close by. Interestingly enough, however, in his extant writings Tacitus finds no occasion to mention any of these authors (Xenophon is mentioned once, as a philosopher, at D. 31.6); and his debt to the Greek historiographical tradition has never been fully explored - largely because it is not at all clear how great that debt is (in distinct contrast to his predecessors Sallust and Livy, whose respective debt to Thucydides and Herodotus is mentioned explicitly by Quintilian, Inst. 10.1.101). Rather, the influences at work on Tacitus seem to lie more substantially and understandably on the Latin side. Yet even here the list of Roman historians actually named by Tacitus is markedly circumscribed: no early annalist receives mention. In fact, with the exception of Julius Caesar (and two references to the Sullan historian Cornelius Sisenna), he names no historian prior to Sallust and Livy. The historical work of Asinius Pollio receives cursory notice, most significantly in the great speech of the historian Cremutius Cordus at A. 4.34.4. With respect to those writing after Livy, in the Annals Tacitus identifies as sources for various pieces of information Pliny the Elder, Cluvius Rufus and Fabius Rusticus, as well as the memoirs of Agrippina the Younger and the Neronian general Domitius Corbulo.

When Rilke moved to the Château de Muzot in the Canton of Wallis, Switzerland, in 1921, he was hoping he had found the place where he might complete his Duino Elegies. And indeed, having worked on this cycle, with several long interruptions, for a whole decade, Rilke did finally manage to bring this project to a conclusion in February 1922. This is, however, only one half of the success story that took place in Muzot. The other half concerns yet another major work that came into being there: The Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke's last poetic cycle in German. Even before Rilke completed the Duino Elegies he had composed almost the entire first part of the sonnets, twenty-six poems altogether, in only four days (from 2 to 5 February 1922), and immediately after the Elegies had been finished, the second part consisting of another twenty-nine poems, was written in little more than a week (15-23 February). While the sonnets of the second part were rearranged after their composition, the first part predominantly reflects the chronological order in which the sonnets were written. The whole cycle was first published in 1923 by Insel in Leipzig. In part because of the closely connected genesis of The Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies, Rilke always viewed the former in relation to the latter.

This chapter places Rilke's writings and aesthetics within the broader context of modernism. Although there is little debate today about whether or not Rilke can be regarded as a modernist writer, the question as to how exactly he fits into the history and landscape of European modernism is less straightforward to answer. Never a card-carrying member of any of the numerous modernist movements that emerged during the modernist period, nor a signatory to any of the manifestos issued by these groups, he was given to styling himself as a solitary writer beyond movements. Rilke's relationship to modernism as a whole, and to individual movements within it, thus represents an individual inflection of the modes and structures of modernism to his own particular poetics.

First, though, because the term 'modernism' is much-debated and contested, it will be necessary briefly to set out the way in which I will use it. I have then divided my discussion into three sections, each of which is broadly correlated to the widely accepted stages of development of Rilke's work. 'Holistic modernism' charts the early Rilke's concerns to fuse art and life, aestheticism and vitalism. 'Metropolitan modernism' discusses the middle phase of Rilke's work, the impact of Paris and the contemporary visual arts in the New Poems (1907/8) and TheNotebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), while Rilke's late work, represented by the Duino Elegies (1912-22), is configured as 'mythic modernism'.

The relationship of the emperors to the senate is one of Tacitus' most important themes; and a striking feature of his writing, particularly of the Annals, is the large amount of space devoted to senatorial matters, especially the writing of obituaries and the recording of motions, sometimes proposed by men of little consequence. Power in the Roman Republic had been diffused between magistrates, senate and people. Polybius (6.10-18) saw an ideal, balanced constitution, but his and Livy's work allows the inference that after the Second Punic War the senate was the dominant force in the body politic. In the late Republic its power declined in the face of a resurgent populace and the ruthless ambition of magistrates and pro-magistrates. The Principate brought further decline, since Augustus' determination to remove the political conditions that had allowed his own rise meant that, inter alia, the collective will of the aristocracy had to be curbed. With him the senate made, almost unconsciously, a kind of Faustian pact: in return for massively enhanced dignity it surrendered much of its capacity to initiate actions of any real consequence. Augustus and Tiberius made much of consulting the senate, but their dominance rested more on an iron grip on the legions than on senatorial support.

For the first three decades of the Victorian age, economic writing and economic development proceeded along paths that joined at every opportunity. Not only did much economic writing directly inform policies that altered the relations between land, labour and capital, it also shaped economic behaviour by alternately generating perceptions of stability and uncertainty. Although some of this writing found its way into textbooks or specialist monographs, equally sophisticated and/or influential analyses of economic activity were as likely to appear in tracts, sermons, speeches or periodicals intended for the lay public. This situation started to change in the 1870s, and by the 1890s an avowedly less 'political' discipline of economics had begun to distinguish itself from genres of 'literary' economics, which persisted in the lay press. This new writing, which would mature in the twentieth century as neoclassical economics, appeared in new professional journals and in textbooks designed for mathematically trained specialists. Broadly speaking, it accompanied a maturing economy, for which much of the political framework had been set by earlier debates.

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge occupies a singular position in the history of modernist prose. Rilke's only 'novel', written in the Paris years during a pivotal crisis of the poet's creative imagination and finished with some difficulty far from Paris, is fundamentally concerned with issues of poetic language, vision and imagination. It tells the story of Malte, a twenty-eight-year-old aristocratic Dane whose artistic aspirations bring him to Paris, where he begins to record his life crisis, experiences and memories in a series of diary-like notations. However, Rilke soon abandons the fictional convention of telling the story of an individual bound by a defined space and by chronological time. Especially in the second part, fictional plot gives way to a series of literary and historical reflections that push the work toward allegory and essayism rather than providing narrative and plot. Read in light of this second part, even the first, more directly narrative section of the text, which is focused on Malte's traumatic reactions to city life, appears less like a novel and more like a concatenation of narrative fragments and miniatures not primarily controlled by a storyline, but by a consciousness and subjectivity in crisis.

Thus it makes sense that Rilke should draw on the convention of the diary form. But here, too, the suggestion of a sequential diary is abandoned as soon as it is introduced. There is only one conventional diary heading, the one on the first page: ‘September 11, rue Toullier’. After that, the reader’s expectation of a stable progression in time and space is again undermined. The informed reader soon begins to wonder to what extent the figure of Malte serves as a screen for the writer himself – Rilke in Paris, his own life crisis as a poet, his sense of alienation and estranged perception, of ego loss or ego dispersal – all displaced and rewritten as the life crisis of an other, a fictional figure.