Rainer Maria Rilke

• 1. Introduction

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  Rainer Maria Rilke was born René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke in Prague on the 4th of December 1875, and he died on the 29th of December 1926 in a Swiss sanatorium. In the roughly five decades between those two dates, he wrote some of the most intensely alive poetry in any European language. Yet the name he carried into adulthood was not the one he was given at birth. A married woman he fell in love with in Munich persuaded him to drop "René" for something she judged more forceful and Germanic. That small act of renaming points to something essential about Rilke: his identity was always partly a collaboration, shaped by lovers, patrons, sculptors, and dead poets he had never met.

  What drove a boy expelled from a military school in Austria to become one of the best-selling poets in the United States? How did ten years of writer's block and a world war produce what critics would call the highest point of his career? And what is it about a poet who wrote in German, and sometimes in French, that still turns up in television shows, motion pictures, and self-help books a century after his death?

• 2. A Difficult Childhood

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  Prague in the late 19th century was the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, ruled by Austria-Hungary, and it was there that Rilke's mother, Sophie Entz, came from a well-to-do family called the Entz-Kinzelbergers who lived at Herrengasse 8. His father, Josef Rilke, had failed in a military career and settled for work as a railway official. From the start, the household was shaped by grief. Phia, as his mother was known, had lost an infant daughter within one week of birth, and she channelled her mourning into the surviving child in an unsettling way. According to Rilke himself, he had to wear "fine clothes" and was treated "like a big doll". His parents' marriage ended in 1884.

  His parents then enrolled the artistically gifted boy in a military academy in Sankt Pölten, Lower Austria, where he attended from 1886 until 1891, when illness forced him to leave. He moved to Linz and entered a trade school, living with a publisher named Hans Drouot at Graben 19. Expelled in May 1892 at sixteen, he returned to Prague and spent three years being privately tutored for a university entrance exam he eventually passed in 1895. He took courses in literature, art history, and philosophy before leaving in 1896 for Munich, carrying the weight of a childhood that would resurface, transformed, throughout his writing life.

• 3. Love, Russia, and a New Name

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  Lou Andreas-Salomé, widely travelled and intellectually formidable, met Rilke in Munich in 1897. She was a married woman and he fell completely in love with her. At her urging, he changed his first name from René to Rainer, a shift she believed made him sound more masculine, forceful, and Germanic. The relationship lasted until 1900 and produced two extensive trips to Russia together.

  In 1899, Rilke and Lou traveled to Moscow with her husband, Friedrich Carl Andreas, and there Rilke met Leo Tolstoy. A second journey, between May and August 1900, took only the two of them to Moscow and Saint Petersburg, where Rilke met the family of Boris Pasternak and a peasant poet named Spiridon Drozhzhin. Author Anna A. Tavis identifies the cultures of Bohemia and Russia as the key influences on Rilke's poetry and consciousness. Even after their romantic separation, Salomé remained his most important confidante until the end of his life. She had trained in psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud between 1912 and 1913, and she shared that knowledge with Rilke, adding yet another dimension to an already layered intellectual exchange.

  In 1900, Rilke visited the artists' colony at Worpswede, where he met the sculptor Clara Westhoff. They married the following year, and their daughter Ruth was born in December 1901.

• 4. Paris and the Thing-Poems

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  In the summer of 1902, Rilke traveled to Paris to write a monograph on the sculptor Auguste Rodin. What began as a critical commission became one of the most transformative encounters of his creative life. For a period, Rilke served as Rodin's secretary, and he also lectured on and wrote a long essay about the sculptor's work. Rodin taught him the value of objective observation, a lesson that pushed Rilke to abandon the subjective and sometimes incantatory language of his earlier poetry.

  At the same time, Rilke encountered the paintings of Paul Cézanne, whose disciplined attention to visible surfaces reinforced what he was learning from Rodin. The creative result was the New Poems, celebrated for their "thing-poems" in which Rilke turned his concentrated gaze on animals, statues, and objects. Neue Gedichte appeared in 1907, followed by Der Neuen Gedichte Anderer Teil in 1908. The two "Requiem" poems came in 1909.

  Paris was also where he drew on his own sense of dislocation to write his only novel. He started The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge in 1904 and completed it in January 1910. The book's semi-autobiographical narrator confronts illness, alienation, and the proximity of death in a modern city, drawing on Nietzsche's thought (which Rilke had come to know through Lou Andreas-Salomé) and on impressionistic techniques from Cézanne and Rodin. During the later part of that decade, Rilke also kept a permanent room at the Hotel Reina Victoria in Ronda, a town in southern Spain known as a centre of bullfighting, from December 1912 to February 1913.

• 5. The Elegies and a Decade of Silence

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  Between October 1911 and May 1912, Rilke stayed at Castle Duino, near Trieste, as a guest of Princess Marie of Thurn und Taxis. It was there, in 1912, that he began the poem cycle that would become the Duino Elegies. The opening lines he set down contain one of the most famous questions in modern poetry: "Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the hierarchies of angels?" His conception of angels in the elegies was not conventionally Christian. Rilke had developed an admiration for El Greco's work as early as 1908, and he visited Toledo in the winter of 1912-13 to study El Greco's paintings directly. Scholars have suggested that El Greco's manner of depicting angels shaped Rilke's own vision.

  Then World War I interrupted everything. The outbreak of war caught Rilke in Germany, and he was unable to return to Paris, where his property was confiscated and auctioned. He spent most of the war in Munich. In early 1916 he was called up, forced through basic training in Vienna, and then, through the intercession of influential friends, transferred to the War Records Office. He was discharged on the 9th of June 1916. The experience of military service reopened the wounds of his military academy years and nearly silenced him as a poet. Between 1913 and 1915, brief creative episodes had produced a few additions to the elegies; after that, the cycle lay unfinished for years.

  He settled eventually in Switzerland, finding in mid-1921 a permanent home at the Château de Muzot in the commune of Veyras, close to Sierre in Valais. Then, in February 1922, the dam broke. In what Rilke described as "a savage creative storm", he completed the Duino Elegies in several weeks. Critics and scholars after his death would name this ten-elegy cycle his most important work.

• 6. Sonnets to Orpheus

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  Wera Knoop, born in 1900 and dead by 1919, was a friend of Rilke's daughter Ruth. News of her death prompted Rilke to begin the Sonnets to Orpheus. Between the 2nd and the 5th of February 1922, he completed the first section of 26 sonnets. He then shifted his attention back to the Duino Elegies, finishing them on the evening of the 11th of February. He returned immediately to the Sonnets and completed a second section of 29 sonnets in less than two additional weeks.

  Throughout the cycle, Wera appears both by name and through indirect allusions to a dancer and to the mythical Eurydice. Rilke insisted that although she serves as a named character in only one poem, "Wera's own figure... nevertheless governs and moves the course of the whole." The figure of Orpheus, whom Rilke calls "the god with the lyre", recurs alongside other mythical presences including Daphne, and the cycle also carries biblical allusions, among them a reference to Esau.

  In May 1922, Rilke's patron Werner Reinhart purchased Château de Muzot and renovated it so that Rilke could live there rent-free. Reinhart also introduced Rilke to the Australian violinist Alma Moodie, a protégée of Reinhart's. Rilke was moved by her playing and wrote in a letter: "What a sound, what richness, what determination. That and the Sonnets to Orpheus, those were two strings of the same voice. And she plays mostly Bach! Muzot has received its musical christening..."

• 7. Politics, Letters, and Later Work

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  Rilke supported the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919. He became friends with the playwright Ernst Toller and mourned the deaths of Rosa Luxemburg, Kurt Eisner, and Karl Liebknecht. He admitted that of the five or six newspapers he read daily, those on the far left most closely matched his own opinions. After the Bavarian Republic was crushed by the right-wing Freikorps, however, he grew reticent about politics out of fear for his safety. Then, in January and February 1926, he wrote three letters praising Benito Mussolini and describing fascism as a healing agent, writing to the Mussolini-adversary Aurelia Gallarati Scotti.

  From 1923 onward, illness required long stays at a sanatorium in Territet near Montreux. Despite these interruptions, he continued writing. A collection of ten letters he had written to a young officer cadet named Franz Xaver Kappus between 1902 and 1908 was published posthumously in 1929 under the title Letters to a Young Poet. Kappus had first written to Rilke when he was 19, studying at the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt under a professor who had taught Rilke at the boarding military school in Sankt Pölten more than fifteen years earlier. Rilke declined to judge the young man's verses but instead wrote at length about how a poet should feel, love, and seek truth.

  In 1924, a poet named Erika Mitterer began sending Rilke verses. He replied with approximately 50 poems of his own and called her writing a Herzlandschaft, a landscape of the heart. He identified this as the only genuinely productive poetic collaboration of his entire career. Mitterer visited Rilke in November 1925, and her Correspondence in Verse with Rilke was published and praised in 1950.

• 8. Death and Endurance

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  Rilke's illness was diagnosed as leukemia shortly before his death. He suffered ulcerous sores in his mouth, pain in his stomach and intestines, and deepening low spirits. He died open-eyed in the arms of his doctor on the 29th of December 1926, at the Valmont Sanatorium in Switzerland. He was buried on the 2nd of January 1927 in the Raron cemetery to the west of Visp.

  For his own epitaph he chose lines he had written: "Rose, o pure contradiction, desire / to be no one's sleep beneath so many / lids." A myth grew up around his death involving roses from his garden and a thorn wound that refused to heal, though the medical record points to leukemia as the cause.

  His influence spread widely and in unexpected directions. W. H. Auden, born in 1907, has been called Rilke's most influential English disciple; Auden paid homage to him repeatedly and borrowed the imagery of angels. Writers including William H. Gass, Galway Kinnell, Robert Bly, W. S. Merwin, John Ashbery, and the novelist Thomas Pynchon have all acknowledged his influence. The American rock band Rainer Maria took their name from him directly. In the later 20th century, self-help authors began citing Rilke widely, and his lines appeared in television shows, films, and books whenever the subject turned to love or angels. Rilke is now counted among the best-selling poets in the United States, a fact that would likely have astonished the man who spent years in Swiss sanatoriums struggling to finish a poem cycle he had started in a castle above the Adriatic Sea.