"Where are the days of Tobias," Rainer Maria Rilke asks sorrowfully in the Second Duino Elegy. Are those days forever gone, the poet wonders, when man was blessed with the immediacy and simplicity of speech that were the mark of Tobias, the simple one? Can we latecomers in a long cultural process ever hope to find our way back to such an immediacy and simplicity and thereby become again truly creative or, as the Greeks said, ">poietic ?