OF ALL THE LITERARY GENRES, poetry is perhaps most strongly shaped by the language in which it is written, and least determined by political territory. Poems often have no culturally and nationally distinctive setting; they are seldom peopled by characters with an obvious national identity; and reception of the poetic forms that were dominant in the twentieth century is rarely dependent on performance in a public space. Nevertheless, all poetry is specific to language communities and therefore to cultural and political communities. The complexity of those communities in Austria, and their changing identities in the political contexts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, First Republic, Third Reich, and Second Republic, have given poets a keen awareness of language and its possibilities. This is enhanced by the daily encounter with the difference between High German and dialect, between the regionally neutral “German” Schriftsprache (written language) and the regionally specific “Austrian” language of oral communication. Throughout the twentieth century, the Austrian lyric has reached out across national boundaries to the point of obscuring its cultural origins, appealing to the entire German language community. Simultaneously, it has served to articulate and strengthen local identities. The purpose of this chapter is to explore connections and continuities in Austrian poetry from the perspective of Austria as a changing political and cultural entity that is defined as much by its tensions, fissures, and dispersals as by its cohesiveness.

The Legacy of Rilke

While the poetry of Hugo von Hofmannsthal continued to resonate in the work of younger poets, and the visionary imagery and sonorous diction of Georg Trakl provided an important stimulus for many poets between the wars and after, it was above all Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) who constituted the benchmark for younger Austrian poets. He was born in Prague, far from the territory that was to define Austria from 1918 onward, but in a cultural center within the Austrian Empire that contributed vitally to the now established canon of German modernist literature. Much of Rilke's poetry was written, or at least commenced, before the First World War, but the works that gave him his supreme status were completed in 1922: Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies, 1923) and Die Sonette an Orpheus (The Sonnets to Orpheus, 1923).