In the Duino Elegies, Rilke’s resistance to the forces of modernization is marshaled not as resistance against loss but rather as mournful resistance against the disappearance of the space and symbolic resources in which loss could still be experienced and worked through. The Duino Elegies are, in a sense, second-order elegies: elegies for the passing of the space in which elegy is still possible.

Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life