"Ultima Thule": Ghosts and Borderlines in Yeats and Rilke

Abstract

T H[E numerous affinities of image, attitude, and theme betwe. W. B. Yeats and R. M. Rilke are not often not d;1 Yeats is s ldoi discussed in European terms and Rilke is more often compared wil Valery or Eliot. Some of their affinities are biographical, some aesthEic, but the only explicit influence of either upon the other was Yeats attempt to refute a partially understood intermediary text about Rilk6 views on death by writing the lines that became his epitaph. Perhas there are ways of seeing how Yeats and Rilke expressed the interca:nections between the worlds of the living and the dead, especially in tb imagery of ghosts and borderlines, that will make them seem less oposed than Yeats believed at the time. Literary history has surprisingly little to show that might conner two such well-known contemporaries. Rilke, ten years younger, seers never to have read any Yeats,2 although he knew other Irish authot. He may or may not, in 1923, have been hoping for the Nobel prize ) crown the completion of the Duino Elegies; he can hardly have faild