Lyric OrientationsIn Lyric Orientations, Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge explores the power of lyric poetry to stir the social and emotional lives of human beings in the face of the ineffable nature of our mortality. She focuses on two German speaking masters of lyric prose and poetry: Friedrich Hlderlin (17701843) and Rainer Maria Rilke (18751926). While Hlderlin and Rilke are stylistically very different, each believes in the power of poetic language to orient us as