Masako Hirai
Kobe College, Japan
Rilke, Lawrence and the Spirit of the Age
The affinity between Rilke and Lawrence has not been fully explored. A few biographical references may not be enough to prove their mutual influences. However, they had common friends, literature and art, and similar ideas about solitude, travelling, death, sex, death of Christianity, the Apocalyptice vision of historty, and interest in the non-human life. Their phrases, in German and English, were sometimes strikingly similar. These 'connections' best reveal the Spirit of the Age.