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| Rainer Maria Rilke |
Barcelona is suffering a new cold drop. It is an archaic meteorological term used to refer to any high impact rainfall events occurring in the autumn along the Mediterranean coast. Heavy and intense rain, cold weather and low tempetures announce the winter arrival in a few days.
The Grandma likes these days although they are sad and uncomfortable to do your normal business. She has decided to stay at home and invite her closer friend, Jordi Santanyí, to read some poetry. They love literature and they have chosen Rainer Maria Rilke, the Bohemian-Austrian poet whose poems talk about deeply existential themes. Rilke was born on a day like today in 1875. It has been a fantastic election for a cold sad grey day.
Before Jordi's arrival, The Grandma has read a new chapter of Mary Stewart's This Rough Magic.
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875-29 December 1926), better known as Rainer Maria Rilke was a Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist.
He is widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets. He wrote both verse and highly lyrical prose. Several critics have described Rilke's work as inherently mystical. His writings include one novel, several collections of poetry and several volumes of correspondence in which he invokes haunting images that focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude and profound anxiety.
These deeply existential themes tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist writers.
More information: Poetry Foundation
Rilke travelled extensively throughout Europe (including Russia, Spain, Germany, France and Italy) and, in his later years, settled in Switzerland -settings that were key to the genesis and inspiration for many of his poems. While Rilke is most known for his contributions to German literature, over 400 poems were originally written in French and dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland.
Among English-language readers, his best-known works include the poetry collections Duino Elegies (Duineser Elegien) and Sonnets to Orpheus (Die Sonette an Orpheus), the semi-autobiographical novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge), and a collection of ten letters that was published after his death under the title Letters to a Young Poet (Briefe an einen jungen Dichter).
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| Rainer Maria Rilke |
In the later 20th century, his work found new audiences through use by New Age theologians and self-help authors and frequent quotations by television programs, books and motion pictures. In the United States, Rilke remains among the more popular, best-selling poets.
He was born René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke in Prague, capital of Bohemia (then part of Austria-Hungary, now part of the Czech Republic). His childhood and youth in Prague were not especially happy.
His parents pressured the poetically and artistically talented youth into entering a military academy in Sankt Pölten, Lower Austria, which he attended from 1886 until 1891, when he left owing to illness. He moved to Linz, where he attended trade school. Expelled from school in May 1892, the 16-year-old prematurely returned to Prague.
From 1892 to 1895, he was tutored for the university entrance exam, which he passed in 1895. Until 1896, he studied Literature, Art History, and Philosophy in Prague and Munich.
In 1897 in Munich, Rainer Maria Rilke met and fell in love with the widely travelled, intellectual woman of letters, Lou Andreas-Salomé. Rilke changed his first name from René to Rainer at Salomé's urging, because she thought that name to be more masculine, forceful, and Germanic. His relationship with this married woman, with whom he undertook two extensive trips to Russia, lasted until 1900. Even after their separation, Salomé continued to be Rilke's most important confidante until the end of his life. Having trained from 1912 to 1913 as a psychoanalyst with Sigmund Freud, she shared her knowledge of psychoanalysis with Rilke.
In 1898, Rilke
undertook a journey lasting several weeks to Italy. In 1899, he
travelled with Lou and her husband, Friedrich Carl Andreas, to Moscow
where he met the novelist Leo Tolstoy. Between May and August 1900, a
second journey to Russia, accompanied only by Lou, again took him to
Moscow and Saint Petersburg, where he met the family of Boris Pasternak
and Spiridon Drozhzhin, a peasant poet. Author Anna A. Tavis cites the cultures of Bohemia and Russia as the key influences on Rilke's poetry and consciousness.
More information: Reconstructionary Tales
In 1900, Rilke stayed at the artists' colony at Worpswede. Later, his portrait would be painted by the proto-expressionist Paula Modersohn-Becker, whom he got to know at Worpswede. It was here that he got to know the sculptor Clara Westhoff, whom he married the following year. Their daughter Ruth (1901–1972) was born in December 1901.
In the summer of 1902, Rilke left home and travelled to Paris to write a monograph on the sculptor Auguste Rodin. Before long his wife left their daughter with her parents and joined Rilke there. The relationship between Rilke and Clara Westhoff continued for the rest of his life; a mutually-agreed-upon effort towards a divorce was bureaucratically hindered by the fact that Rilke was a Catholic.
At first, Rilke had a difficult time in Paris, an experience that he called upon in the first part of his only novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. At the same time his encounter with modernism was very stimulating: Rilke became deeply involved with the sculpture of Rodin and then the work of Paul Cézanne.
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| Rainer Maria Rilke |
For a time, he acted as Rodin's secretary, also lecturing and writing a long essay on Rodin and his work. Rodin taught him the value of objective observation and, under this influence, Rilke dramatically transformed his poetic style from the subjective and sometimes incantatory language of his earlier work into something quite new in European literature. The result was the New Poems, famous for the thing-poems expressing Rilke's rejuvenated artistic vision. During these years, Paris increasingly became the writer's main residence.
The most important works of the Paris period were Neue Gedichte (New Poems) (1907), Der Neuen Gedichte Anderer Teil (Another Part of the New Poems) (1908), the two Requiem poems (1909), and the novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, started in 1904 and completed in January 1910.
During the later part of this decade, Rilke spent extended periods in Ronda, the famous bullfighting centre in southern Spain. There he kept from December 1912 to February 1913 a permanent room at the Hotel Reina Victoria.
Between October 1911 and May 1912, Rilke stayed at the Castle Duino, near Trieste, home of Princess Marie of Thurn und Taxis. There, in 1912, he began the poem cycle called the Duino Elegies, which would remain unfinished for a decade because of a long-lasting creativity crisis.
More information: Poetry in Translation
Rilke had developed an admiration for El Greco as early as 1908, so he visited Toledo during the winter of 1912/13 to see Greco's paintings. It has been suggested that Greco's manner of depicting angels has influenced the conception of the angel in the Duino Elegies. The outbreak of World War I surprised Rilke during a stay in Germany. He was unable to return to Paris, where his property was confiscated and auctioned. He spent the greater part of the war in Munich. From 1914 to 1916 he had a turbulent affair with the painter Lou Albert-Lasard.
Rilke was called up at the beginning of 1916 and had to undertake basic
training in Vienna. Influential friends interceded on his behalf -he
was transferred to the War Records Office and discharged from the
military on 9 June 1916. He returned to Munich, interrupted by a stay on
Hertha Koenig's Gut Bockel in Westphalia.
The traumatic experience of military service, a reminder of the horrors of the military academy, almost completely silenced him as a poet.
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| Rainer Maria Rilke |
On 11 June 1919, Rilke travelled from Munich to Switzerland. The outward motive was an invitation to lecture in Zurich, but the real reason was the wish to escape the post-war chaos and take up his work on the Duino Elegies once again. The search for a suitable and affordable place to live proved to be very difficult. Among other places, Rilke lived in Soglio, Locarno and Berg am Irchel. Only in mid-1921 was he able to find a permanent residence in the Château de Muzot in the commune of Veyras, close to Sierre in Valais.
In an intense creative period, Rilke completed the Duino Elegies in several weeks in February 1922. Before and after, Rilke rapidly wrote both parts of the poem cycle Sonnets to Orpheus containing 55 entire sonnets. Together, these two have often been taken as constituting the high points of Rilke's work. In May 1922, Rilke's patron Werner Reinhart bought and renovated Muzot so that Rilke could live there rent-free.
From 1923 on, Rilke increasingly had to struggle with health problems that necessitated many long stays at a sanatorium in Territet, near Montreux, on Lake Geneva. His long stay in Paris between January and August 1925 was an attempt to escape his illness through a change in location and living conditions. Despite this, numerous important individual poems appeared in the years 1923–1926, including Gong and Mausoleum, as well as the abundant lyrical work in French. His book of French poems Vergers was published in 1926.
In 1924, Erika Mitterer began writing poems to Rilke, who wrote back with approximately 50 poems of his own and called her verse a Herzlandschaft (landscape of the heart). This was the only time Rilke had a productive poetic collaboration throughout all his work. Mitterer also visited Rilke. In 1950, her Correspondence in Verse with Rilke was published, and received much praise.
More information: Picture Poems
Rilke supported the Russian Revolution in 1917 as well as the Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919. He became friends with Ernst Toller and mourned the deaths of Rosa Luxemburg, Kurt Eisner, and Karl Liebknecht. He confided that of the five or six newspapers he read daily, those on the far left came closest to his own opinions.
He developed a reputation for supporting left-wing causes, and thus, out of fear for his own safety, became more reticent about politics after the Bavarian Republic was crushed by the right-wing Freikorps.
In January and February 1926, Rilke wrote three letters to the Mussolini-adversary Aurelia Gallarati Scotti in which he praised Benito Mussolini and described fascism as a healing agent.
Shortly before his death, Rilke's illness was diagnosed as leukemia. He suffered ulcerous sores in his mouth, pain troubled his stomach and intestines, and 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. He was buried on January 2, 1927, in the Raron cemetery to the west of Visp.
More information: The New Republic
Rose, oh reiner widerspruch, lust,
niemandes schlaf zu sein unter soviel lidern.
Rose, o pure contradiction, desire,
to be no one's sleep beneath so many lids.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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