Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892-1910

by Rainer Maria Rilke, Jane Bannard Greene (-Translator)

This representative selection from Rilke's large and extraordinary correspondence provides a kind of spiritual autobiography of the poet. The period here covered reflects all the great experiences of Rilke's early adult his difficult beginnings, his relationships with Lou Andreas-Salome and with his wife Clara, his two journeys to Russia, his contact with the Worpswede artists, the influence of Paris, the revelation of Cezanne. Many of the letters are psychologically revealing; many touch upon characteristic themes, or freshly transcribe experience that sooner or later passes into the poetry.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Classics, Germany, Biography

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

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 Nez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Rilke... it's what English majors do. I spent years reading Rilke and never tired of consuming the next letter. Ineffable.... that's Rilke.

For years I would be alone on Christmas since I didn't have a family that ever invited me home, so I'd go downtown and sit in a corner and read Rilke. And I became hooked on the Norton editions - with their thin pages and well set type.

I suppose Rilke is all about longing for something that can never be found. So that's life.

[Ernesto Aguirre · Rating 4 out of 5]

Powerful

[Liza Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

“When—as sometimes happens-you are in a dream of mine, then that dream and its afterring on the following day are more real than all daily reality, are world and happening. I am thinking about it because the night before the eleventh and that day passed thus: in your presence which makes me peaceful, patient, and good.”


“They distinguished so spasmodically in those days between the foreign and the accustomed; they did not notice how both are everywhere in densest interpretation. They saw only that the near did not belong to them, and so they thought that what was really possessable and valuable would be abroad, and longed for it. And they considered their unconfined and inventive longing a proof of its beauty and greatness. For they still fully believed that we can fetch something into ourselves, draw it in, swallow it, whereas really we are so filled up from the start that not the smallest thing could be added. But things can all exercise influence. And they all do exercise it from afar, near as well as distant things, none touches us, all communicate with us across separations, and the ring on my hand can no more enter into me than the farthest stars can into us: only as with rays can all things reach us, and as the magnet evokes and sets in order the powers in some sensitive object, so they can create a new order in us as they act upon us. And before this insight do not near and far vanish? And isn't it our insight?”


“In the end, I came via Turin and Genoa to this little place, which, from bygone happy days, I have honored with something like flial love, adorning it in my grateful memory from year to year with all the jewelry of my wishes and all the treasures of my remembrance. So that it was not without danger to come and to make clear to an unsuspecting reality here that it would have to raise itself to the high level of my grateful imagination. Meanwhile the disappointment has not been too violent, no greater than with almost any seeing-again, and if I cannot yet rejoice as I once rejoiced in the wideness of the woods, in the size of the sea, and the grace of all this glory, that is because of my hesitant health, which still lacks the strength for joy, that superabundance that is necessary in order to take heart, beyond the little hindrances, in the great glories. . . •“


“—There are, as I come to think of it, certain little animals, beetles, and insects, that fall into such states of arrested life if one touches them or comes near them; often I have watched them, have noticed that they let themselves be rolled along like things, that they do everything to be as like things as possible: they do this when they see a danger's bigness coming toward them—and want to save themselves. Has my condition like causes? Is this becoming numb and keeping still that goes to my very core, up to the very entrance of my heart's chambers, an instinctive defense by which something that can annihilate me is to be deceived? Who knows?
I will trust and not count the time and will wait for it to pass. But then bestir myself, for nothing has yet been done. . . .”


“There is perhaps nothing so jealous as my profession; and not for me a monk's life in the close association and isolation of a cloister, but rather I must see to it that little by little I myself shall grow into a cloister and stand there in the world, with walls about me, but with God and the saints within me, with very beautiful pictures and furnishings within me, with courts around which moves a dance of pillars, with fruit orchards, vineyards, and wells whose bottoms are not to be found.”


“I am always saddened in such landscape exhibitions, before this evident, prize-crowned, unassailable beauty: since it is almost too much even to pick up a stone on the path, a chestnut, a withered leaf, since even the beauty of a little, insignificant and ordinarily trivial thing (once one has recognized it) makes the heart overflow, what is one to do in such concerts of beauty, where everything is a program number and rehearsed and intentional and selected?”

[Ami Boughter · Rating 4 out of 5]

"But I still lack the discipline, the being able to work, and the being compelled to work, for which I have longed for years. Do I lack the strength? Is my will sick? Is it the dream in me that hinders all action? Days go by and sometimes I hear life going. And still nothing has happened, still there is nothing real about me; and I divide again and again and flow apart."

[Christopher]

My only wish is that my procrastination should be as noble as Rilke’s