Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke

AUSTRIAN-GERMAN POET

WRITTEN BY: Hans Egon Holthusen

Rainer Maria Rilke, original name René Maria Rilke, (born Dec. 4, 1875, Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary [now in the Czech Republic]—died Dec. 29, 1926, Valmont, Switz.), Austro-German poet who became internationally famous with such works as Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus.

Early Life.

Rilke was the only son of a not-too-happy marriage. His father, Josef, a civil servant, was a man frustrated in his career; his mother, the daughter of an upper-middle-class merchant and imperial councillor, was a difficult woman, who felt that she had married beneath her. She left her husband in 1884 and moved to Vienna so as to be close to the imperial court.

Rilke’s education was ill planned and fragmentary. It had been decided that he was to become an officer to assure him the social standing barred to his father. Consequently, after some years at a rather select school run by the Piarist brothers of Prague, he was enrolled in the military lower Realschule of Sankt Pölten (Austria) and four years later entered the military upper Realschule at Mährisch-Weisskirchen (Bohemia).

These two schools were completely at variance with the needs of this highly sensitive boy, and he finally was forced to leave the school prematurely because of poor health. In later life, he called these years a time of merciless affliction, a “primer of horror.” After another futile year spent at the Academy of Business Administration at Linz (1891–92), Rilke, with the energetic help of a paternal uncle, was able to straighten out his misguided educational career. In the summer of 1895, he completed the course of studies at the German Gymnasium (a school designed to prepare for the university) of the Prague suburb of Neustadt.

By the time he left school, Rilke had already published a volume of poetry (1894), and he had no doubt that he would pursue a literary career. 

Matriculating at Prague’s Charles University in 1895, he enrolled in courses in German literature and art history and, to appease his family, read one semester of law. But he could not become really involved in his studies, and so in 1896 he left school and went to Munich, a city whose artistic and cosmopolitan atmosphere held a strong appeal. Thus began his mature life, of the restless travels of a man driven by inner needs, and of the artist who managed to persuade others of the validity of his vision. The European continent in all its breadth and variety—Russia, France, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy—was to be the physical setting of that life.

Maturity.

In May 1897 Rilke met Lou Andreas-Salomé, who shortly became his mistress. Lou, 36 years of age, was from St. Petersburg, the daughter of a Russian general and a German mother. In her youth, she had been wooed by, and refused, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche; 10 years before her meeting with Rilke she had married a German professor. Rilke’s affair with Lou was a turning point in his life. More than a mistress, she was a surrogate mother, the leading influence in his éducation sentimental, and, above all, the person who introduced Russia to him. Even after their affair ended, Lou remained his close friend and confidante. In late 1897 he followed her to Berlin to take part in her life as far as possible.

Russia was a milestone in Rilke’s life. It was the first and most incisive of a series of “elective homelands,” leaving a deeper mark than any of his subsequent discoveries, with the possible exception of Paris. He and Lou visited Russia first in the spring of 1899 and then in the summer of 1900. There he found an external reality that he saw as the ideal symbol of his feelings, his inner reality. Russia for him was imbued with an amorphous, elemental, almost religiously moving quality—a harmonious, powerful constellation of “God,” “human community,” and “nature”—the distillation of the “cosmic” spirit of being.

Russia evoked in him a poetic response that he later said marked the true beginning of his serious work: a long three-part cycle of poems written between 1899 and 1903, Das Stunden-Buch (1905). Here the poetic “I” presents himself to the reader in the guise of a young monk who circles his god with swarms of prayers, a god conceived as the incarnation of “life,” as the numinous quality of the inner-worldly diversity of “things.” The language and motifs of the work are largely those of Europe of the 1890s: Art Nouveau, moods inspired by the dramas of Henrik Ibsen and Maurice Maeterlinck, the enthusiasm for the art of John Ruskin and Walter Pater, and, above all, the emphasis on “life” of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Yet, the self-celebratory fervour of these devotional exercises, with their rhythmic, suggestive power and flowing musicality, contained a completely new element. In them, a poet of unique stature had found his voice.

Soon after his second trip to Russia, Rilke joined the artists’ colony of Worpswede, near Bremen, where he hoped to settle down among congenial artists experimenting with developing a new lifestyle. In April 1901 he married Clara Westhoff, a young sculptor from Bremen who had studied with Auguste Rodin. The couple set up housekeeping in a farm cottage in nearby Westerwede. There Rilke worked on the second part of the Stunden-Buch and also wrote a book about the Worpswede colony. 

In December 1901 Clara gave birth to a daughter, and soon afterward the two decided on a friendly separation so as to be free to pursue their separate careers.

Rilke was commissioned by a German publisher to write a book about Rodin and went to Paris, where the sculptor lived, in 1902. For the next 12 years, Paris was the geographic center of Rilke’s life. He frequently left the city for visits to other cities and countries, beginning in the spring of 1903, when, to recover from what seemed to him the indifferent life of Paris, he went to Viareggio, Italy. 

There he wrote the third part of the Stunden-Buch. He also worked in Rome (1903–04), in Sweden (1904), and repeatedly in Capri (1906–08); he traveled to the south of France, Spain, Tunisia, and Egypt and frequently visited friends in Germany and Austria. Yet Paris was his second elective home, no less important than Russia, for both its historic, human, “scenic” qualities and its intellectual challenge.

Rilke’s Paris was not the belle époque capital steeped in luxury and eroticism; it was a city of abysmal, dehumanizing misery, of the faceless and the dispossessed, and of the aged, sick, and dying. It was the capital of fear, poverty, and death. His preoccupation with these phenomena combined with a second one: his growing awareness of new approaches to art and creativity, an awareness gained through his association with Rodin. Their friendship lasted until the spring of 1906. Rodin taught him his personal art ethic of unremitting work, which stood in sharp contrast to the traditional idea of artistic inspiration. Rodin’s method was one of dedication to detail and nuance and of an unswerving search for “form” in the sense of concentration and objectivization. Rodin also gave Rilke new insight into the treasures of the Louvre, the Cathedral of Chartres, and the forms and shapes of Paris. Of the literary models, the poet Charles Baudelaire impressed him the most.

During those Paris years, Rilke developed a new style of lyrical poetry, the so-called Ding-Gedicht (“object poem”), which attempts to capture the plastic essence of a physical object. Some of the most successful of these poems are imaginative verbal translations of certain works of the visual arts. 

Other poems deal with landscapes, portraits, and biblical and mythological themes as a painter would depict them. These Neue Gedichte (1907–08) represented a departure from traditional German lyric poetry. Rilke forced his language to such extremes of subtlety and refinement that it may be characterized as a distinct art among other arts and a language distinct from existing languages. The worldly elegance of these poems cannot obscure their inherent emotional and moral engagement. 

When Rilke, in letters about Paul Cézanne written in the autumn of 1907, defines the painter’s method as a “using up of love in anonymous labor,” he doubtless was also speaking of himself. In a letter to Lou Salomé written in July 1903, he had defined his method with this formulation: “making objects out of fear.”

Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910; The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge, 1930), on which he began work in Rome in 1904, is a prose counterpart to the Neue Gedichte. That which hovered in the background in the poems, behind the perfection of style, is in the foreground of the prose work: the subjective, personal problems of the lonely occupant of a Paris hotel room, the “fear” that is the inspiration for the creation of “the objects.” If the poems seem like a glorious affirmation of the Symbolists’ idea of “pure poetry,” the Aufzeichnungen reads like a brilliant early example of Existentialist writing. 

It is an artfully assembled suite of descriptive, reminiscent, and meditative parts, supposedly written by Malte, a young Danish expatriate in Paris who refuses to abide by the traditional chronology of narrative exposition but, instead, presents his themes as “simultaneous” occurrences set against a background of an all-encompassing “spatial time.” Here are found all of Rilke’s major themes: love, death, the fears of childhood, the idolization of a woman, and, finally, the matter of “God,” which is treated simply as a “tendency of the heart.” The work must be seen as the description of the disintegration of a soul—but a disintegration not devoid of a dialectic mental reservation: “Only a step,” writes Malte, “and my deepest misery could turn into bliss.”

The price Rilke paid for these masterpieces was a writing block and depression so severe that it led him to toy with the idea of giving up writing. Aside from a short poetry cycle, Das Marienleben (1913), he did not publish anything for 13 years. The first works in which he transcended even his Neue Gedichte were written early in 1912—two long poems in the style of elegies. He did not undertake their immediate publication, however, because they promised to become part of a new cycle. He wrote these two poems while staying at Duino Castle, near Trieste.

At the outbreak of World War I Rilke was in Munich, where he decided to remain, spending most of the war there. In December 1915 he was called up for military service with the Austrian army at Vienna, but by June 1916 he had returned to civilian life. The social climate of these years was inimical to his way of life and to his poetry, and when the war ended he felt almost completely paralyzed. He had only one relatively productive phase: the fall of 1915, when, in addition to a series of new poems, he wrote the “Fourth Duino Elegy.”

Late Life.

Rilke spent the next seven years in Switzerland, the last of his series of elective homes. He once more came into full command of his creative gifts. In the summer of 1921, he took up residence at the Château de Muzot, a castle in the Rhône Valley, as the guest of a Swiss patron. In February 1922, within the space of a few days of obsessive productivity, he completed the Duino cycle begun years earlier and, unexpectedly and almost effortlessly, another superb cycle of 55 poems, in mood and theme closely related to the Elegies—his Sonette an Orpheus (Sonnets to Orpheus).

The Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies) is the culmination of the development of Rilke’s poetry. That which in the Stunden-Buch had begun as a naively uncertain celebration of “life,” as a devotional exercise of mystical worship of God, and which in Malte led him to assert that “this life suspended over an abyss is, in fact, impossible” in the Elegies sounds an affirmative note, in panegyric justification of life as an entity: “The affirmation of life and death prove to be identical in the Elegies,” wrote Rilke in 1925. These poems can be seen as a new myth that reflects the condition of “modern” man, the condition of an emancipated, “disinherited” consciousness maintaining itself as a counterpart to the traditional cosmic image of Christianity. Like Nietzsche, Rilke opposes the Christian dualism of immanence and transcendence. Instead, he speaks out for an emphatic monism of the “cosmic inner space,” gathering life and death, earth and space, and all dimensions of time into one all-encompassing unity. This Rilkean myth is articulated in an image-laden cosmology that, analogous to medieval models, sees all of reality—from animal to “angel”—as a hierarchical order. 

This cosmology, in turn, results in a systematic, consistent doctrine of life and being in which man is assigned the task of transforming everything that is visible into the invisible through the power of his sensory perceptions: “We are the bees of the invisible.” And this ultimate fate of man is concretized in the activity that alternately is called “saying,” “singing,” “extolling,” or “praising.” 

Thus the poet is turned into the protagonist of humanity, its representative “before the Angel” (the pseudonym of God), as in the “Ninth Elegy,” and even more strikingly in the Sonnets to Orpheus. This message of the late Rilke has been celebrated by some as a new religion of “life” and rejected by others as the expression of an unbridled aestheticism and an attempt on the part of the poet at “self-redemption” by virtue of his personal gift.

The triumphant breakthrough of February 1922 was Rilke’s last major contribution, yet both thematically and stylistically some of his late poems go beyond even the Elegies and the Sonnets in their experimentation with forms that no longer seem at all related to the nature of the poetic language of the 1920s. In addition to these late works he also wrote a number of simple, almost songlike poems, some short cycles, and four collections in French, in which he pays homage to the landscape of Valais.

Muzot remained his home, but he continued his travels, mostly within Switzerland, devoting himself to his friends and his vast, superbly articulate correspondence. Early in 1925 he again went to Paris, with whose literary life he had remained in close touch. He was royally received by such old friends as André Gide and Paul Valéry as well as by new admirers; for the first and only time in his life, he was at the center of a literary season in a European metropolis. But the strain of this visit proved too much for his frail health. On August 18, unannounced, he slipped out of Paris. He had been ill since 1923, but the cause of his debility, a rare form of incurable leukemia, was not diagnosed until a few weeks before his death in 1926. He died at a sanatorium above Territet, on Lake Geneva.

Hans Egon Holthusen