Sunday Feature: Among the Ranks of Angels: Rainer Maria Rilke

Martyn Crucefix, who has translated Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies, explores their attraction for our finest poets. While Rilke disliked the English language, this, his best-known work, has had the greatest impact on English readers and writers of any modern European poem. Martyn talks to writers including Stephen Spender, Stephen Cohn, Don Paterson, Seamus Heaney and Jo Shapcott, and unpacks Rilke, revealing what makes him so engaging, such as his idea that a poem is an object in itself, that the poet's role is to sing, to praise. The contributors also explore Rilke's ideas of the role of the imagination and inspiration, and how he renders the subtlest of experiences in language of great beauty