Lyric Orientations: Hölderlin, Rilke, and the Poetics of Community by Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge (review)

With full awareness of the risks, Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge has written an exemplary book that takes seriously the philosophical and ethical potential of lyric poetry in general, illuminates the contributions of Hölderlin and Rilke to the task of getting oriented in (communal) spaces of significance, and that rarely forgets that her principal objects are not philosophical essays or systematic treatises but poems. Taking cues from Stanley Cavell on skepticism-as both a truth about the human condition to be acknowledged and, in certain (epistemological) forms, as a temptation to be resisted-Eldridge argues persuasively that several late poems by Friedrich Hölderlin and eight of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus reveal the importance, perhaps the human necessity, of replacing the quest for certainty, or the desire to attain certain knowledge of the world and others, with uncertain and unsponsored acknowledgment of the claims external reality and other minds make upon us. Addressing persistent doubts in the secondary literature about the relationship between the first and second parts of Rilke's novel, Eldridge provides an account of Malte as a consistent whole, centered on the anxieties and fears of what she calls "skeptical vulnerability" and the (failed) strategies of overcoming a sense of insecurity, heteronomy, and meaninglessness.