Poetic inspiration was stapled to locality with Hesiod's memo from the Muses. Place is important: the site of that inaugural visitation is precipitous, not flat. With Hesiod's fable, poetry is convened as a site-specific art. Consider the specificity of site in the case of the twentieth century's most famous instance of fraught inspiration: Rilke's Duino Elegies. Inaugurated in a Trieste castle perched on a cliff over the Adriatic, further work on the Elegies stalled in the miasmic locales of Paris and Munich, and the cycle was only completed ten years later (along with the unexpected bonus, Sonnets to Orpheus) in a tower in the Swiss Alps. (Duino Elegies is a book that needed a passport to reach its altitudes.) The Elegies and the Sonnets, taken together, verify poetry's legacy of the vertical axis.