Sonnets to Orpheus and Letters to a Young Poet

by Rainer Maria Rilke

They are perhaps most mysterious, even to me, ' wrote Rainer Maria Rilke of the Sonnets to Orpheus, 'in the manner in which they arrived and imposed themselves on me - the most puzzling dictation I have ever received and taken down.' Rilke, born in Prague in 1875, died at Valmont near Montreux in the last days of 1926. His Sonnets to Orpheus may appear comparatively simple, even casual, at first reading, but they are crammed with content which resonates far beyond the familiar legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. The Sonnets have an astonishing range which takes in the Singing God and his beloved Eurydice; legend in general, along with time, flight and change; architecture, music and dance; animals, plants, flowers and fruits. They ask to be read by the ear and by the inner eye as much as by the intellect. The Sonnets were 'taken down' during a very few weeks in 1922 - weeks in which the poet also brought his Duino Elegies to completion. In them, Rilke partly identifies himself with Orpheus. The young dancer Vera, for whom the Sonnets are inscribed, taken so young into the Underworld, becomes Eurydice. A tension which adds life to Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus comes through a paradox. Rilke's was a deeply inward, introspective nature, but in the Sonnets he succeeds brilliantly in looking out from his isolation: in making poetry from material which lies in an important sense 'outside'. Rilke's ten letters to the young officer-cadet Franz Xavier Kappus, written between 1903 and 1908, were later published as Letters to a Young Poet. By now the letters have become a part of literary folklore. They contain insights which are as profound today as when they were written, almost a century ago.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

180 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

A 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.

Reviews

[John Sperling · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a man wandering in the desert, dying of thirst, and Rilke is water.

[Kate Savage · Rating 3 out of 5]

"if you truly possess this love for lesser things and if, by serving them, you can quietly win the trust of things that seem humble -- then everything will grow easier for you."

The Sonnets did nothing for me, but I can probably chalk a lot of that up to translation.

It was the Letters that I admired. I don't entirely trust the assertions -- that a poet needs to travel further and further inward, distanced as much as possible from the book-business and literary circles. But when I do want to believe it, it's nice to have an advocate in Rilke.