Authors: Rainer Maria Rilke

At the age of eleven, when Rilke had completed his early schooling, his parents’ marriage dissolved. Rilke was sent to boarding school; his father’s will prevailing, he entered a rigorous military academy. He later reported that the Prussian discipline traumatized him; although some critics have doubted the severity of the training, Rilke certainly reacted against the bourgeois values of a society that supported such institutions and ideals. Chronic illnesses, probably psychosomatic, eventually forced his withdrawal. He was expected to take over his uncle’s law practice in Prague, but he became increasingly disenchanted with law and attracted to poetry. With the publication of his first volume, Leben und Lieder (life and songs), in 1894, his vocation was set.

For the next several years he published regularly, though he would ultimately renounce as juvenile all this material, including his most popular work, The Tale of the Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke, a rhythmical balladesque recounting of the experiences of a seventeenth century soldier, Rilke’s ancestor. Yet his real breakthrough as a poet had already begun. It started with his discovery of Friedrich Nietzsche, who instilled a philosophy of struggle, and of the Danish novelist Jens Peter Jacobsen, who taught him to look at nature as a source of images corresponding to emotional states. He followed this with two trips to Russia, where he was overwhelmed with both the immense landscapes and the combination of piety and fatalistic resignation in the Russian soul. Contact with an artists’ colony at Worpswede near Bremen fused these influences by helping him look for plastic equivalents for feelings, something akin to T. S. Eliot’s theory of the objective correlative. Finally he went to Paris in 1902; he found the modern metropolis terrifying and spirit-robbing. The sculptor Auguste Rodin took him in, insulated him against the shock of the city, taught him more about the way sculpture could shape poetic images, and hired him as a private secretary.

The employment lasted only eight months, but it moved Rilke to take an entirely fresh approach to lyric poetry. This revelation was disclosed only gradually. The first traces appear in The Book of Images, to the second edition of which (in 1906) he added thirty-seven poems, including some of those for which he is best known. Even before this he published The Book of Hours, in which he first adopts the persona of a Russian monk meditating on the interrelationship of humankind, nature, and God, then speaks as the poverty-stricken street people of Paris. These poems introduce a unique pantheistic mysticism, a celebration of natural religion that absorbs familiar Christian images.

The transformation reached full flower in his New Poems, especially in the second volume, published in 1908. These were different enough from anything he had done earlier that he distinguished them as “experiences”; the others were simply “feelings,” immature approaches to the complex whole. He presents a version of his Parisian transformation in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, in which the title character is a fictionalized counterpart of Rilke experiencing the isolation and depression of the sensitive soul in the modern cosmopolis. It begs comparison with James Joyce’s parallel account in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), though it has never received the same public acclaim.

This frenzy of publication left Rilke exhausted. He sought solace in travel, first to North Africa, then to Spain, following which he occupied himself mostly in translations of French, Spanish, Italian, and English poets.

Finally, while spending a season at Schloss Duino on the Adriatic, he felt new inspiration. He managed to finish two components of what would become Duino Elegies, but he became oppressed first with fears of and then with the fact of World War I. That oppression kept him from writing for ten full years, until 1922. When inspiration returned, it came with a vengeance: His writing became so compulsive that he was left physically debilitated afterward. Yet he was able to finish Duino Elegies—and to alter the course of not only German but also world poetry in the process.

This book consists of ten wide-ranging poems, loosely linked in a cycle, which explore Rilke’s personal universe of spiritual struggle as a microcosm of the more general problem of human existence. The poems are obscure, dense, and laden with private symbolism, and unraveling them required the best efforts of a generation of scholars. One key, derived in part from his earlier poetry, has been found in Rilke’s concept of nature, which he sees as the source of both poetic experience and human action. In his vision, however, both poet and humankind are profoundly alienated from nature; the attempts of both to reestablish the vital link repeatedly end in frustration. Humans are doomed to suffer defeat in their efforts to restore themselves to their source in nature; this makes tragedy the norm of human experience. Worse, in attempting to disclose this reality, the poet must work with words and images that reflect only dimly the truth of experience.

Finally eased of this burden, Rilke turned to Sonnets to Orpheus, a Dionysian celebration that balances the Apollonian austerity of Duino Elegies. Rilke composed these fifty-five sonnets within a few weeks after finishing the earlier harrowing poems. The sonnets share the difficulty of style and obscurity of reference of Duino Elegies, but in all other respects they are a complete contrast. Their tone is ecstatic, celebratory, full of light, joyful rather than lamenting. The sonnets commemorate integration and reunion: Orpheus, the spirit of song, moves nature with his singing and harmonizes it with humankind. Imitating him, the poet becomes the means of spiritualizing nature and human experience in it. In balancing Duino Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus demonstrates that Rilke’s aesthetic and mysticism embrace both polarities. Where he would have gone from this point remains conjecture. He died in Switzerland, of acute leukemia, in 1926.