GAS: Poetry, Art and Music: From The Vault: Rainer Maria Rilke, presented by Matthew Bowers

Sunday, May 30, 2021

From The Vault: Rainer Maria Rilke, presented by Matthew Bowers

Rainer Maria Rilke 1875-1926

"I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.” In his time Rainer Maria Rilke was considered one of the greatest German lyric poets of his day. He became famous with such works as Duineser Elegien and Die Sonette an Orpheus. They both appeared in 1923.

He created the 'object poem' as an attempt to describe with absolute detail and clarity, physical objects. He called it the 'silence of their concentrated reality'.

Rainer was born in Prague as the son of Josef Rilke and Sophie Entz. A particular fact that was important in the developmental years of Rilke's life was that his mother called him Sophia. She forced him to wear girl's clothes until he was five years old, allegedly compensating for the earlier loss of her previous baby daughter. Rilke's parents separated when he was nine.

As a poet Rilke made his debut at the age of nineteen (1894), his style of writing similar to Heinrich Heine (a German poet, writer and literary critic). In Munich he met the Russian intellectual Lou Andreas-Salome, who was an older woman who deeply influenced him. She was a Russian-born psychoanalyst and a well-traveled author, narrator, and essayist. In Florence, where he spent some months in 1898, Rilke wrote: "I felt at first so confused that I could scarcely separate my impressions, and thought I was drowning in the breaking waves of some foreign splendor."

While Rilke was with Lou Andreas-Salome and her husband, Rilke travelled through Russia in 1899. Here he visited Leo Tolstoy, among other authors. Rilke was deeply impressed by what he learned of Russian mysticism and he focused passionately on seeking truth; he found that one must go through all kinds of suffering to finally break through into Love and Light. During this period he started to write The Book of Hours: The Book of Monastic Life, which appeared in 1905.

In Letters to a Young Poet (1929) 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 denied you to write." Quite a powerful sentiment for sure.

Rilke had married the young sculptress, Klara Westhoff in 1901. She had been one of Auguste Rodin's pupils. François Auguste René Rodin was a French sculptor generally considered the founder of modern sculpture. Rilke and Klara had a daughter, Ruth, but marriage lasted only one year. During this period Rilke composed in rhymed, metered verse, the second part of The Book of Hours. At this time he was expressing his spiritual interests and beliefs. After Rilke had separated from Klara, he settled in Paris to write a book about Rodin and to work for his secretary from 1905-06.

In the Spring of 1906, an overworked Rilke left Rodin and revised his work Das Buch der Bilder, publishing it in an enlarged edition. He also wrote The Tale of the Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke. The poem recounts the adventures of Christopher Rilke, who traveled with a company of soldiers and then, after a night in a castle with a lover, fought and died in a war in Turkey and is mourned by an old woman. This release became a very popular success. While in Paris during this time, Rilke developed a new style of lyrical poetry. After Neue Gedichte: New Poems (1907-08, )came a notebook named Die Aufzechnungen des Malte Laurdis Brigge (1910), his most important prose work to that point. It took the form of a series of semi autobiographical spiritual confessions but written by a Danish migrant in Paris.

Rilke took a hiatus as a poet for twelve years before writing Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, which are concerned with "the identity of terror and bliss" and "the oneness of life and death". Duino Elegies was developed in two bursts of inspiration which was separated by ten years off. 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?"

Rilke visited his friend Princess Marie von Thurnun Taxis in 1910 at Duino, her remote castle on the coast of the Adriatic, and returned again next year. There he started to compose the poems, and the work proceeded easily. Then after serving in the army, Rilke was afraid that he would never be able to finish the writings, but finally in 1922 he completed Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies) in a chateau in Muzot, Switzerland.

In the philosophical poems Rilke meditated on time and eternity, life and death, art versus the ordinary. His tone conveyed melancholy. Rilke believed in the coexistence of the material and spiritual realms, but "human beings were for him only spectators of life, grasping its beauties momentarily only to lose them again. And 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." The work deeply influenced such poets as Sidney Keyes, Stephen Spender, Robert Bly, W.S. Merwin, John Ashbery, and W.H. Auden, who had Rilkean angels appear in the collection In Times of War (1939).

In 1913 Rilke returned to Paris, but he was forced to return to Germany due to the coming of the First World War as part of the Austrian army. Duino Castle was bombed to ruins and Rilke's personal property was confiscated in France. After 1919 he lived in Switzerland, writing and gardening. From time to time he went to Paris or Italy for a few months. Rilke's companion during his last years was the artist Baladine (Elisabeth Dorothea Spiro), whose son, Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski), had also become an artist. Rilke wrote a foreword to a book illustrated by Balthus's drawings of cats.

Shortly before his death, Rilke had an illness that was diagnosed as leukemia. He had been suffering ulcerous sores in his mouth, while pain troubled his stomach and intestines, as a result he struggled with increasingly low spirits. Open-eyed, he died in the arms of his doctor on December 29, 1926, in the Valmont Sanatorium in Switzerland.