Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke

by Ralph Freedman

In this highly praised and extraordinary biography, Ralph Freedman traces Rilke's luminous career by weaving together detailed accounts of pivotal and formative episodes from the poet's restless life with a close, intimate reading of the verse and prose that refract them. This lively and engrossing biography offers much of interest to Rilke's growing body of followers.
 

Genres: Biography, Poetry, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, History

640 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Ralph Freedman, who grew up in Nazi Germany, emigrated at 19 to England and ultimately the United States. He served in the US Army during World War II, in Tunisia, Sicily and Italy, afterwards graduating from the University of Washington and earning a doctorate at Yale. He taught 12 years at the University of Iowa, 22 at Princeton and for two post-retirement years at Emory University. He wrote and published two novels (Divided, 1948 and Rue the Day, 2009), criticism (The Lyrical Novel, 1963), biographies of Hesse (1978), Rilke (1996), and many essays. His works have been translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Korean, and Japanese. A Chinese version of the biography of Rilke is in press.

Reviews

[John Ferngrove · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am finding this book very frustrating as biography. Certainly it is deeply researched and the details of Rilke's life are punctiliously presented. And there is no doubt that I can see a little more into the poems through being aware of the life circumstances that informed their creation. Rilke the man, the person as seen objectively is easily apparent. The dates and times of the arrival of trains and carriages, and when letters were written and posted are all made available. But at no point does one feel one as looking at the world through Rilke's eyes, which I take to be a characteristic of all the best biography. The psychological dimension of his inward life is hesitantly and inconsistently described. It is as though each time the author catches himself in the act of psychological interpretation he changes his mind and breaks off leaving one unsure of what point was being made. Reading this in parallel with Daniel Poliakoff's extraordinary Jungian/Archetypal reconstruction of the poet's personal development through analysis of the poems, Rilke: a Soul History, leaves the impression that the two authors can hardly be discussing the same individual. Most disconcerting, perhaps, is the author's habit of presenting necessarily speculative aesthetic judgements about the poems, poetics clearly being the author's penchant, as though they were biographically factual and as a kind of substitute for psychological insight. All this is making this large book a struggle to read and get to the end of.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

550 pages of an almost day-by-day coverage of Rilke's life. Average length of his infatuations? About six weeks. Sometimes he was prolific, sometimes blocked. Never at ease in one circumstance, he was a pathological traveler and maker and breaker of relationships.

It would be helpful if the book had a chronological outline, as well as a cast of characters of the people involved. Because Rilke so often repeated the same relational dynamics, the succession of infatuations tend to become a single blur.

Of his influences, I found myself most interested in Marianna Alcoforado, Jens Peter Jacobsen, Gaspara Stampa and Franz Werfel.

Since I haven't read "A Ringing Glass: The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke" I can't compare the two books, except to point out that "A Ringing Glass" is 150 pages shorter, and there is little overlap in the photographs reproduced in the two books.

[Philemon - · Rating 5 out of 5]

A marvelous, simply written, deeply moving biography of an enigmatic figure who was arguably the greatest 20th-century poet in any language. Rilke was many things, prodigy, literary careerist, serial womanizer, fellow traveler with the wealthy and celebrated, but the poetry that took flight from that life was pure, transcendent, reaching its culmination in the ten Duino Elegies that took him a decade to write. Rilke delighted in his gift and accomplishments, but did he understand his own work? Has anyone? His poetry is, as many have said, poetry itself. It is an ecstatic act, oracularly measured, perhaps to be drunk like wine, seen like painting or architecture, felt like a Rodin sculpture. Perhaps, finally, we can only sigh in gratitude from within the inexplicable shadows of life and death.

[Priscilla · Rating 1 out of 5]

John Ferngrove's review expresses my frustrations to a "T." I, who have thoroughly enjoyed many a bio, am not going to finish this one. Rilke has always been a mystery to me, and I was looking forward to this one. This biography makes Rilke feel even more distant....Makes "Life" feel more distant.
p.s. Michael Hofmann's 1996 NYT review calls this bio "lively." Hmmm....

[Alan Reese · Rating 1 out of 5]

Gave up a third of the way through. I don;t know if it were me or the lackluster telling of Rilke's life, whcih seemed to have some psychological intrigue in his relationships. I just never felt engaged, and it become more of a duty or chore to pick it up and read a page or two.

[Joyce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Makes one feel almost as enervated as the man himself, exhaustingly comprehensive

[sqrt2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch, Lust,
Niemandes Schlaf zu sein unter soviel
Lidern.

[Greg Dyer]

Loaned to Kevin.