What do you think?
Rilke on Love and other Difficulties. trans. Mood. 1975. soft cover.
Poetry about love and its difficulties. Sensual and explicit sexually. Considered to be Rilke's most mature work.
117 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 1975
About the author
Rainer Maria Rilke
1,939 books7,350 followersA mystic lyricism and precise imagery often marked verse of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose collections profoundly influenced 20th-century German literature and include
The Book of Hours
(1905) and
The Duino Elegies
(1923).
People consider him of the greatest 20th century users of the language.
His haunting images tend to focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety — themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.
His two most famous sequences include the Sonnets to Orpheus , and his most famous prose works include the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge .
He also wrote more than four hundred poems in French, dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland, his homeland of choice.
People consider him of the greatest 20th century users of the language.
His haunting images tend to focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety — themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.
His two most famous sequences include the Sonnets to Orpheus , and his most famous prose works include the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge .
He also wrote more than four hundred poems in French, dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland, his homeland of choice.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
Read
September 2, 2024Rilke encourages taking every little feeling, every confusing monolith and being— considering it joy, and elevating pressure off of understanding it completely from the beginning, since “we’re all apprentices” at everything “important”— which is everything that we get emotionally invested in. The book features a fantastic epilogue from Mood which questions, and shares the same feeling of myself after reading it— “was this all just one big beginning?” Maybe this is the beginning to another beginning? And for one, “beginnings [are] perhaps the most difficult thing of all.” Thank you Aunt Luna for recommending this masterpiece to me.
August 23, 2026
“The rose is a mystery. Soft velvet petals, each curling over and gesturing other petals, which in turn protect still others, which finally curve around ..... nothing.
Space untouched as the inside of a rose, an angelic space in which one keeps still
[The rose] a body of nothing but radiance”
January 1, 2024
Okay now I get why Rilke is such a figurehead 😭
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews