The Poetry of Rilke - Softcover

Introduction
Rereading Rilke by Adam Zagajewski
We read Rilke for his poetry, for his prose, for his novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and for hundreds if not thousands of the letters he left, but there seems to be another important motive too: in our eyes his life pre­sents itself as a .awless example of a modern artist’s existence, an example purer perhaps than any other, perfect in its relentless pursuit of beauty.
In the German literary tradition it is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who enjoyed for a very long time the status not only of an immense poet, play­wright, and novelist but also of a sublime role model, an ideal human being, highly successful yet knowing the price of resignation, standing in the middle of a bourgeois society that had just rediscovered the value of intellectual ac­complishment; Goethe, who happily accepted the position of someone who represented more than just his own singular destiny, graciously allowing oth­ers—through the numerous windows of his letters, diaries, and conversa­tions—to have a look at him in his different hours and moods; Goethe, the scion of a patrician Frankfurt family, who as a young man became a minister at the Weimar court and a scientist entertaining each night in his lovely house on Frauenplan visitors from every imaginable country, explaining to them se­crets of geology, biology, and literature—someone Napoleon would wish to meet and, as we know, did meet. Goethe, who renewed the German imagina­tion even as he remained skeptical of the newborn nationalism of his compa­triots during the Napoleonic Wars; Goethe, who was proud of his long life and didn’t stop short of mocking others for dying too early; Goethe, a poet and thinker whose spiritual territory was so vast that it encompassed many el­ements of the Enlightenment but also involved vital ingredients of the Ro­mantic era; and .nally, Goethe, who knew well the silence of the writer’s study but who also witnessed in 1792the misery of premodern warfare in the mud, hunger, and hopelessness of an unsuccessful military campaign—not as a soldier but as an observer sharing the misery of others.
And then, next to this giant, Rainer Maria Rilke—a dif.dent, homeless poet born on the periphery of the Habsburg Empire, an artist who had to in­vent his own pedigree, who claimed an aristocratic lineage—the claim seems rather doubtful—an introvert, a lover of solitude, someone who, especially in his later years, didn’t care much for publishing and remained until the end of his short life famous only among a rather small group of connoisseurs. Never a minister like Goethe, never a senator like Yeats, never an ambassador like Saint-John Perse. Yes, he enjoyed the company of aristocrats, but not at any court; he’d only see them as private persons, gladly when they were set against the background of their natural environment, their castles and palaces: they were for him colorful relics of a more or less imaginary me­dieval Europe. The fact that Duino Castle—its name is forever linked to Rilke’s poetry—which belonged to the Thurn und Taxis family, was de­stroyed in World War I (though later rebuilt) is symptomatic: the aristocrats Rilke knew were the shadows of once powerful magnates. None of the in.u­ential politicians of his time would have thought of meeting him. Clemenceau and Rilke? Lloyd George and Rilke? Lenin and Rilke? No, impossible, ridicu­lous: a joke. Paul Valéry? Yes, that makes sense; the two poets met and their meeting left a trace, a well-known photograph (but also and foremost Rilke’s translations of Valéry’s poetry).
What is so attractive for us in Rilke’s symbolic status has almost nothing to do with the external circumstances of the period. Unlike Goethe, Rilke was not a robust representative of his epoch; he seemed to be, rather, an elegant question mark on the margin of history. Within the spectrum of literary mod­ernism he stood among the antimoderns (in the sense of being hostile to many characteristics of the newly born industrial civilization), though he didn’t care to develop his ideas in any coherent way. He was a poet, not a philosophical journalist, after all. He was like the Chopin of Gottfried Benn’s marvelous poem: “when Delacroix propounded theories / he grew restless, for his part he could not / explain the Nocturnes.”
It is his inner discipline, the discipline of his life, the sacri.ces he made, that appeal to us. We cherish a certain intriguing narrowness of his external existence, which we can see and contemplate like an arrow ferociously speed­ing to its ultimate target: Rilke ’s poetic work. We believe we can see his rich inner life through the veil of his writings. If anything, Rilke was the epoch’s secret voice, we think, the epoch’s whisper, as opposed to its of.cial expres­sion. This, we think sometimes, is how his time should have been: not the absurd, terrifying killing .elds of Verdun but the tranquillity of the poet’s meditation in the midst of a great city or an Alpine meadow. His life spent in travels, his life as a search for the .nal illumination, fascinates us, but also his willingness to learn from Rodin and Cézanne and, later, to teach a young poet what poetry is about. We like to imagine lonely Rilke in Toledo or in Ronda in Spain, or think of him in Rome or in Cairo—and we always remember that from each of these travels he would bring with him a few pebbles we later .nd in the splendid mosaic of the Duino Elegies.
A lonely person he was, and yet not a stranger to social life. An incredibly proli.c letter writer, he once told Merline—the nickname of Baladine Klos­sowska, the mother of Balthus—that he had to write 115 letters to make up for a backlog in his correspondence! These letters are extremely interesting, mostly written with the brio of the major artist he was, and should be seen as an important part of his oeuvre (as, for example, in the case of Elizabeth Bishop’s letters).
The most mesmerizing part of this biography is Rilke’s iron-willed wait­ing for the Duino Elegies to arrive, to visit his poetic mind. This is perhaps a unique case in the history of literature: a major poet who expected a certain poem for a long time—not any “great poem” but a particular one—appre­hending its very nature, just not receiving it yet. We, the latecomers, know that the .rst four of the ten elegies were written between 1912 and 1914 and that he had to wait eight years for the rest of them. In this perspective, World War I can be regarded as just a very unpleasant nuisance that kept the poems from coming—which, by the way, is how Rilke himself often felt about the Great War. He didn’t just wait—later, after the war was over and new possi­bilities opened up for him, he would, with some help from his friends, more or less actively look for a house, a tower, a quiet place on the planet in which to receive the Angel’s message. For this he eventually chose Switzerland, one of the very few European countries not dis.gured by the scars of trenches. The Duino Elegies, as we know, did eventually arrive and gave a glorious meaning to his entire pilgrimage, to his waiting, to his procrastinating, to his moving from one villa to another, to his patience. They gave Rilke’s life the shape of a work of art, made him into a twentieth-century emblem of poetry.
Nobody will admire Rilke as a father or husband; his phobia of being loved doesn’t necessarily convince us, but the form his life acquired through his poetic achievement is awe-inspiring. When Rilke dies in Val-Mont of leukemia (famously not willing to know the name of his illness), we weep, but perhaps a bit less than we would weep for other artists—didn’t he announce that with the Elegies his work had come to a close? How could he live after them? As a retiree? Collecting stamps? Touring exotic countries with other retirees? Writing more mediocre French poems? Is it possible to be a poet in a more perfect way?
Yes, Rilke, the pure artist. At the same time, for some he will be more of a problematic .gure, a freeloader, a half-ridiculous social climber, a snob who impressed a record number of princesses and countesses with his lofty com­portment—but also with his writings. Few among the important modern poets have had so many admirers and so many detractors. Paul Claudel, for instance, noted once in his diary: “This R. M. Rilke almost started a .ght with me once he understood he meant nothing to me. He was bathed in sadness and mediocrity. Not really poor but a pauper. His poetry is unreadable.” Au­guste Rodin had at .rst almost no idea who his secretary was, what his value was. Much later W. H. Auden accepted Rilke ’s greatness only reluctantly. The list of those unseduced or seduced only against their will is much longer.
Rilke has often been presented as an example of an outstanding poet and writer whose beginnings were extremely unassuming, especially when com­pared to the early work of his peers, Hugo von Hofmannsthal or Thomas Mann, whose .rst publications conquered the reading public right away. Hof­mannsthal was well known while still a high school student in Vienna; Mann published his Buddenbrooks at the age of twenty-six (Rilke, an unknown au­thor then, wrote a brilliant review of the novel). Rilke also published as a very young man, but the acclaim he received then was scanty. An anecdote tells of the young Rilke running into the Poet Stefan George in the gardens of Flor­ence (they had brie.y met before in Berlin). George, who was seven years older and who then enjoyed a quiet reputation as someone who had breathed new life into German verse, supposedly told the future author of Malte: “You’ve started to publish too early.” And we know this from Rilke, not from the other poet! This opinion is widespread even now. Rilke’s .rst three poetry collections and his youthful naturalistic dramas are frequented by very few readers these days—probably only by the most conscientious scholars. Their author himself discarded them.
I’ve been struck by the fact that the reception of Rilke ’s work in the United States tends sometimes to obfuscate the context of his oeuvre. Rilke’s poetry is often read without much attention to the historic moment in which it appeared—I mean both the history of literature and History as such. The second half of the nineteenth century is generally considered a low point in the ongoing saga of German poetry. After Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, and the outstanding Romantic poets (Platen, Eichendorff, Uhland, Mörike, Heine) came a time of severe drought. Paradoxically, it coincided with politi­cal success, with the uni.cation of Germany executed under Bismarck’s stern command; it seemed that the country of “Dichter und Denker” had to get rid of high culture (for which it was rightly famous) in order to establish an em­pire in this world, one not made out of dreams. And Bismarck most certainly was not a dreamer. There was almost nothing remarkable in German poetry at the time of Rilke’s birth (1875), which of course helps to explain his own anemic beginnings. This was the time when the heart of European poetry beat in Paris (who would believe it now!). And it was the same Stefan George who went to Paris and heard the word from the Master, from the very lips of Stéphane Mallarmé. The word was discipline, mystery, elegance, hatred of the bourgeois, rejection of mass production, art for art’s sake. Baudelaire was in.uential too, and later Rimbaud. Without George ’s mediation, but also without the grace of Hofmannsthal’s early poems, there would have been no Rilke masterpieces. They, George and Hofmannsthal, were the messengers of modernism in Germany; Rilke learned a lot from them—he stood on their shoulders.
Weak beginnings . . . Robert Musil, however, in his beautiful speech on Rilke pronounced after his death—a text that remains one of the best things ever written about the author of the Duino Elegies—saw a unity in the poet’s work and wittily claimed that the younger Rilke simply imitated the older one. What a wonderful paradox! Yet it’s quite clear that his early work simply re.ected the ornamental taste of the time, the taste of art nouveau, which has dated quite badly, and which gradually evaporated from the pages of Rilke’s books.
Compared to the other major poets, and not only in the German-speaking countries, Rilke embarked on the path that was supposed to lead him to the heights of poetry with a relatively poor knowledge of the German, or Euro­pean, literary tradition. His formal education was rather thin. But he was lucky in other respects: he met in his youth several individuals who taught him a lot, who in.uenced him in the deepest possible way, though it’s not easy to say what exactly he learned from them—maybe some kind of human for­mat of greatness. His professors had little to do with any institution, even if he spent some time—though not much—listening to university lectures. His love affair with Lou Andreas-Salomé, which started when he was twenty-one and she thirty-six and which later was transformed into a lifelong friendship, was certainly highly educational, worth more than any Ivy League school. For a young poet from the provinces, meeting this strikingly original, coura­geous, and brilliant lady was immensely meaningful. That she was the only woman Friedrich Nietzsche ever fell in love with (though apparently she never reciprocated and, as we know from Malraux’s memoirs, couldn’t even remember if she’d exchanged a kiss with him), and that she then wrote one of the earliest well-informed books on the thinker of the eternal return, were of course of great signi.cance. In the 1890s, when Lou Salomé and Rilke met, Nietzsche ’s fame was skyrocketing in Europe. He himself, as we know, never recovered from the breakdown in Turin; he was still alive but practically un­conscious, nursed by his obnoxious sister Elisabeth, later a Nazi, in Weimar. By then Nietzsche was a numb, humble shadow of the once blissful peripatetic philosopher who used to spend hours climbing the hills that dominated Ra­pallo and the shining Mediterranean in search of Zarathustra. It was a blessing for Rilke: to skip several rungs of the intellectual ladder thanks to a gracious and wise lady, a modern Diotima.
Lou Salomé was certainly one of the most dazzling women of her time; when the two of them walked in the meadows in the suburbs of Berlin, bare­foot, as the fashion of the day required, they certainly spoke about the most important things, not just about the weather. She helped him as well with other things: meeting her contributed to tempering his Exaltiertheit—as she called his extravagant temperament. For Lou he changed his name—from René to Rainer—and the shape of his handwriting. That’s easy to say, but what it amounts to is an identity transformation. Through her he also met many well-known Berlin intellectuals; thanks to her they noticed his literary existence.
Almost all the episodes in Rilke’s youth seem to have been instilled with huge didactic value. There were the two trips to Russia (in both of them his companion was Lou Salomé, herself born in St. Petersburg, and speaking Russian perfectly): a short meeting with Tolstoy and a much longer one with the country of his dreams could not replace studying Slavic philology but nonetheless left an important trace on Rilke’s entire life and on his poetic thinking. Then came Worpswede in northern Germany, a village that was just becoming famous for its artists’ colony. Worpswede opened for him new vis­tas in the domain of the visual arts. He lived there for a short while with his wife, Clara, and their young daughter, Ruth. I...