 
Choose another writer in this calendar:
by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
|
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) |
|
Writer and poet, considered one of the greatest lyric poets of modern Germany. Rainer Maria Rilke created the "object poem" as an attempt to describe with utmost clarity physical objects, the "silence of their concentrated reality." He became famous with such works as Duineser Elegien and Die Sonette an Orpheus. They both appeared in 1923. After these books, Rilke had published his major works, believing that he had done his best as a writer. "Art is always the outcome of one's having been in danger, of having gone right to the end of an experience to where no human can go further. And the further one goes the more peculiarly personal and unique does an experience become, and the art-object is but the necessary, irrepressible and most conclusive utterance of this uniqueness." (from a letter to Clara Rilke, 24 June, 1907, in Selected Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: 1902-1922, translated by R. F. C. Hull, Macmillan & Co., 1946, pp. 135-136) Rainer Maria Rilke was born René Karl Wilhelm Johann Joseph Maria
Rilke in Prague, the son of Josef Rilke, a railway official and the
former Sophie Entz, the daughter of a bank official with the title of
Imperial Counsellor. In the opening poem of Larenopfer
(1895) Rilke writes of the city's skyline: "In the old house; streching
before me / I see the whole Prague laid out; / far below the twilight
hour / passes with soft and silent step." (Rilke: The Life of the Work by Charlie Louth, 2023, p. 4) A crucial fact in Rilke's life was that his mother, who had desperately wanted a girl, called him Sophia and forced him to wear girl's clothes until he was aged five – thus compensating for the earlier loss of a baby daughter. Even Rilke's name, Maria, was a girls name. However, his father gave him toy soldiers and dumbbells for exercise. Later Rilke blamed his mother for his unhappy and lonely childhood, but she also encouraged him to read and write poetry. Rilke also learned early many of Schiller's ballads by heart. Rilke's parents separated when he was nine. At the age of ten Rilke was sent by his militarily inclined father to a military academy. Rilke spent miserable years at St. Pölten and Mahrisch-Weisskirchenn until 1891, and then entered a business school in Linz after studies at a preparatory school. He also worked in his uncle's law firm. Rilke continued his studies at the universities of Prague, Munich, and Berlin. As a poet Rilke made his debut at the age of nineteen with Leben und Lieder(1894), written in the conventional style of Heinrich Heine. In Munich he met Lou Salomé, the talented and spiritied daughter of a Russian army officer, who was 14 years his senior, and already well known as a writer. Salomé had been a friend of Nietzsche, who broke off his relationship with Salomé in December 1882. She married in 1887 professor Friedrich Carl Andreas. Salomé influenced Rilke deeply and they become lovers. When
she moved to Berlin in 1897, he followed her. "I have your
letter, your dear letter that does me good with every word, that
touches me as with a wave, so strong and surging, that surrounds me as
with gardens and builds up heavens about me," he wrote to her in a
letter from St. Petersburg in 1900. (Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: 1892-1910, translated by Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton, W. W. Norton & Co., 1945, p. 14) Other important women in Rilke's life were the young sculptress Klara Westhoff, the Swedish writer Ellen Key, Marthe Hennebert, who was a young girl who become a textile designer, the great Italian actress Eleonora Duse, Marie von Thurn und Taxis, and Hertha Koenig, both very wealthy, and Nanny Wunderly-Volkart. In 1899 Rilke traveled with Lou Andreas-Salomé and her husband in Russia, visiting among others Leo Tolstoy.
Rilke was deeply impressed by what he learned of Russian mysticism, but
later he denied that Tolstoy had influenced him any way: his "ethical
and religious naïvetés had no kind of attraction for me". Moreover, he
rarely referred to Tolstoy's books and dismissed his pamphlet What Is Art? as "scurrilous and ludicrous." (Rainer Maria Rilke by E. M. Butler, 1946, p. 57) During this period Rilke started to write The Book of Hours: The Book of Monastic Life, which appeared in 1905. He spent some time in Italy, Sweden, and Denmark, and joined an artists' colony at Worpswede in 1903. In his letters to a young would-be poet, which he wrote from 1903 to 1908, Rilke explained, that "nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you to write; find out whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write." (in Letters to a Young Poet, 1929) In 1901 Rilke married Klara Westhoff, one of Auguste Rodin's pupils. They had a daughter, Ruth. She was born seven months after the marriage, which lasted only one year. However, legally they did not divorce. "It is a question in marriage," Rilke once stated, "to my feeling, not of creating a quick community of spirit by tearing down and destroying all boundaries, but rather a good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude, and shows him this confidence, the greatest in his powers to bestow. A togetherness between two people is an impossibility..." Rilke's affairs with women followed a certain pattern: after falling in love, he first wrote passionate letters but when he started to think that the counterpart had come too near to him, he withdrew from the relationship. "Never forget that solitude is my lot," Rilke once explained in a letter. "I implore those who love me to love my solitude." Rilke composed in rhymed, metered verse, the second part of The Book of Hours.
The work expressed his spiritual yearning. After Rilke had separated
from Klara, he settled in Paris to write a book about Rodin and to work
for his secretary. "O what a solitary is rhis old man who, sunk in
himself, stands fuller of sap than an old tree in autumn," he wrote
in letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé. (Poetry in Theory: An Anthology 1900-2000, edited by Jon Cook, 2004, p. 36) In spite of their opposite personalities, Rilke and Rodin
developed a friendship that lasted for several years. Eventually
the divergenses drove them apart. Under the influence of the famous sculptor and his artisan confidence, Rilke developed his idea of the "thing-poem" modeled after Rodin's art: "The thing is definite, the art-thing must be still more definite; removed from all accident, reft away from all obscurity, withdrawn from time and given over to space, it has become enduring capable of eternity. The model seems, the art-thing is." (from a letter to Andreas-Salomé, 8 August 1903, in Poetry in Theory: An Anthology 1900-2000, edited by Jon Cook, 2004, p. 36) The "thing-poems" (Dinggedichte) were not about dead objects, they came alive in Rilke's writing – in 'Archaic Torso of Apollo' (New Poems, 1908) the ancient statue discovered at Miletus is "stuffed with brilliance from inside" and "gleams in all its power." During his Paris years Rilke developed a new style of lyrical poetry. 'Der Panther,' in which the psychological distinction between the observer and observation melts together, marked the beginning of the period: "Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille / sich lautlos auf –. Dann geht ein Bild hinein, / geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille – / und hört im Herzen auf zu sein." In
the Spring of 1906 Rodin suddenly fired Rilke. Quite probably Rodin was aware of his secretary's
growing discontent. Rilke also had written to some of Rodin's
friends without briefing him first. "Here I am," he stated in a letter to Rodin, "dismissed like a thieving servant." (Twilight of the Belle Epoque by Mary McAuliffe, 2014, p. 129) For
a period Rilke insisted that his respect for Rodin remained the same as
it had been, but then his views changed and he began to be increasingly
conscious of the gap between Rodin's art and his own aesthetic ideals. Focusing more on his own writing, Rilke revised Das Buch der Bilder and published it in an enlarged edition. The Tale of the Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke achieved both critical and popular success. After Neue Gedichte (1907-08, New Poems) Rilke produced a notebook named Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), his most important prose work. It took the form of a series of semiautobiographical spiritual confessions but written by a Danish expatriate in Paris. Finishing the work emptied Rilke's creative powers and he decided to undertake several translations, including the sonnets of Louise Labé. Later reviewing the work George Steiner reproved Rilke because he excelled her: "Where he does so, the original is subtly injured." Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies) was born in two bursts of inspiration separated by WWI. Rilke visited his friend Princess Marie von Thurn und
Taxis-Hohenlohe in 1910 at Duino, her remote castle on the coast of the
Adriatic. There he started to compose the elegies, but the work did proceed easily. After serving in the army,
Rilke was afraid that he would never be able to continue with the work. It took twelve years before he completed Duino Elegies. According to a story, Rilke heard in the wind the first lines of his elegies when he was walking on the rocks above the sea – "Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' / hierarchies?" The whole of 'First Elegy' was written down as though dictation in Château de Muzot, Switzerland in 1922. Rilke also wrote an addition, the Sonnets to Orpheus, which was a memorial for the young daughter of a friend. In the philosophical poems Rilke meditated on time and eternity, life and death, art versus ordinary things. The tone was melancholic. Rilke believed in the coexistence of the material and spiritual
realms, but human being were for him only spectators of life, grasping
its beauties momentarily only to lose them again. With the power of
creativity an artist can try to build a bridge between two worlds,
although the task is almost too great for a man. Rilke influenced
deeply such poets as Sidney Keyes, Stephen Spender, Robert Bly, W.S.
Merwin, John Ashbery, and W.H. Auden, who had Rilkean angels, in his case bomber pilots, appear in the poem 'In Time of War'
(Journey to a War, 1939): "Engines bear them through the sky: they're free / And isolated like the very rich; / Remote like savants . . ." Also a number of philosophers have showed interest in Rilke's work, including the great Austrian/British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who admired Rilke's early poetry, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, a proponent of hermeneutics. Gadamer argeud that the "mythopoetic reversal" is a central feature of Rilke's poetry: the world of the human heart is set over and against ourselves as a mythical world. Rilke's angels are the highest examples of such reversal. ('Lyrics as Paradigm: Hegel and the Speculative Instance of Poetry in Gadamer's Hermeneutics' by J.M. Baker, Jr., in The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, edited by Robert J. Dostal, 2002, p. 158) In 1913 Rilke went to Paris, but he was forced to return to Germany because of the First World War. While in Paris Rilke stayed for a brief time at the artists' studios on rue Campagne-Premiere. The building contained over a hundred small studios made from materials salvaged from from the World Exposision of 1889. Modigliani lived there, as did the American painter James A. McNeill Whistler. When English soldiers were inspired to heroism by Rupert Brooke's poems, young German soldiers took Rilke's Five Cantos / August 1914 to the front. Invited by his former mistress Salomé, Rilke attended, as a guest, the fourth international congress of psychoanalysis in 1914 in Munich, where the antagonism between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung became evident. Rilke was among the handful of modern favorites of Jung. Freud referred to Rilke ("young but already famous poet and a taciturn friend") in his article 'Vergänglichkeit' (1916), his contribution to a "Festschriff" for Goethe. Duino Castle was bombarded to ruins and Rilke's personal property was confiscated in France. But he found another patron, Werner Reinhart, who owned the Castle Muzot at Valais. He allowed Rilke to stay there rent-free. After 1919 Rilke lived in Switzerland, occupied by his work and
roses in his little garden. For time to time he went to to Italy or to
Paris, where he resided at Hôtel Foyot, famous for
its restaurant. The rooms were not too expensive. The hotel was also
the residence from time to time of such writers as Mary Butts, Hilda
Doolittle, T.S. Elot, George Moore, Dorothy Parker, and Raymond
Radiguet. Rilke's companion during his last years was the artist Baladine (Elisabeth Dorothea Spiro), whose son, Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski), become also an artist. Rilke wrote a foreword to a book illustrated by Balthus's drawings of cats. Rilke died on December 29, in 1926. He had suffered from leukemia and spent much time at the Val-Mont sanatorium. However, he died of an infection he contracted when he pricked himself on a rose thorn – or this was what he encouraged in his last days his friends to think. Rilke's sense of alienation was summed up in his words: "This is
what Fate means: to be opposite, to be opposite to everything and
nothing else but opposite and always opposite." (Werewolves, Wolves and the Gothic, edited by Robert McKay and John Miller, 2017, pp. 241-242) In his
early works Rilke imported mystical elements in his poetry, later
Rilke dealt more with the role of an artist, who must "speak and bear
witness." "Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one; you
can't impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe where
he feels more powerful, you are a novice. Show him something simple
which, formed over generations, / lives as our own, near our hand and
within our gaze." (from 'The Ninth Elegy') The
angel of the Elegies had nothing to do with the spiritual being of the Bible – we still
cling to the Visible. According to Rilke it is the "Being who stands for the recognition in the
Invisible of a higher degree of reality." Rilke also called
the angel "terrible" (Jeder Engel ist schrecklich). An important part of Rilke´s writings are his letters (to Marina Tsvetaeva, Auguste Rodin, André Gide, H.v. Hofmannstahl, B. Pasternak, Stefan Zweig
etc.), which have been published posthumously in different collections.
Many times the subject of alonenes, of being isolated from the rest of
the world, comes up. In a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé (August 8, 1903)
he notes that Rodin isolated himself from the external world, and two
days later (August 10, 1903) he complains that his own work has
suffered from "all the trifles the day brings"
– "And I would like somehow to withdraw more deeply into myself, into
the monastery inside me that is replete with the great bells." (Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters, translated by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler, 2006, p. 77) In Letters to a Young Poet
(1929) Rilke states that "To allow the completion of every impression,
every germ of a feeling deep within, in darkness, beyond words, in the
realm of instinct unattainable by logic, to await humbly and patiently
the hour of the descent of a new clarity: that alone is to live one's
art, in the realm of understanding as in that of creativity." (translated by Joan M. Burnham, 2000, p. 26) To the German scholar Hermann Pongs, Rilke tells of his feeling of
being alone since his youth and of his reasons to renounce his earliest
productions. (August 17, 1924). "If I was foolish enough to want to
play out those nullities, I was driven to it by the impatient wish to
prove to my antagonistic environment my right to such activity, a righ
for which, these attempts once displayed, others also might show a
notable inclination to intercede." (Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, Volume Two: 1910-1926, translated by Jane Bannard Greene and M.D. Herter Norton, 1948, pp. 345-346). The Russian poet and novelist Boris Pasternak was a great admirer of Rilke's work; Pasternak's father Leonid had met Rilke in Russia and Italy. When Leonid congratulated Rilke on his 50th birthday, the poet confirmed his love of the old Russia: "... but even if we do not live to see it at its resurrection, the profound, the real, the other surviving Russia has only fallen back on her secret root system, as she did before, under the Tatar yoke; who could doubt that she is still there and is gathering her forces in that dark place, invisible to her own children, leisurely with her own sacred slowness, on to a possibly still-remote future?!" Dmitri Shostakovich used two poems by Rilke, 'Der Tod des Dichters' (Neue Gedichte: Erster Teil) and 'Schlußstück' (Das Buch der Bilder) in his Fourteeth Symphony. In the Soviet Union, Rilke was considered a petit-bourgeois poet. The poems were taken from Tamara Silman's Russian translation, published in 1965. For further reading: Rilke: The Life of the Work by Charlie Louth (2023); Rilke: the Last Inward Man by Lesley Chamberlain (2022); The Quiet Storms of Rainer Maria Rilke by Terrance Lane Millet (2019) You Must Change Your Life: the Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin by Rachel Corbett (2016); Rilke on Death and Other Oddities by John Mood (2007); Rilkes Frauen by Gunnar Decker (2004); The Beginning of Terror: A Psychological Study of R.M. Rilke's Life and Work by D. Kleinbard (1993); Rainer Maria Rilke by Patricia Brodsky (1988); A Ringing Glass by Donald Prater (1986); The Sacred Threshold by J.F. Hendry (1983); Rainer Maria Rilke by Heiz F. Peters (1977); Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties by John Mood (1975); Rilke: Man and Poet by N. Purtscher (1972); Rainer Maria Rilke by R.H. Wood (1970); Rainer Maria Rilke: The Poetic Instinct by Siegfried Mandel (1965); Rilke's Duino Elegies by Romano Guardini (1961); Rainer Maria Rilke by H.F. Peters (1960); Rainer Maria Rilke: The Ring of Forms by F. Wood (1958); Rainer Maria Rilke by by E. Buddenberg (1953); Rainer Maria Rilke by H. Kunisch (1944); Rilke's Apotheosis by E.C. Mason (1938) - Links: John Mood (Rilke on Death and Other Oddities and Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties). See also: Kobo Abe Selected works:
|
