The more thinly a person is stretched across the grid of everyday life and the “richer” her life might seem, the less likely it is that she is at home within herself. And without being at home in oneself, even the most generous individual must shortchange everyone around her. When a close friend deplores her weakness in handling a series of personal challenges, Rilke counsels her with amazing psychological acuity and a typical dose of humility:

You are wrong to think of yourself as “weak” . . . You have this impression because you are permanently stretched thin and every day find yourself poised to accommodate the hundreds of things that your life both gives and takes from you, without anything really staying there. This probably cannot be changed. But what can be changed is perhaps the constitution in which you accomplish these things (now I feel unbelievably immodest and pompous in writing this, I who barely do not even know how to take half a step in any direction . . .). I have often been alarmed that even something that is your most serious concern could assume the shape of a diversion—how should I put it: because it took its place in line with all the other diversions for fear of otherwise not receiving a turn at all . . . I know that there are times when it is basically a salvation to consider everything as a diversion, but these are exceptions, short periods, convalescences.

When life is taken as a diversion, it strangely becomes less than what it could be. What is important will then disguise itself as something entertaining, fun, and pleasant in order to get our attention. Fundamentally, life requires us to yield to its “velocity” if we want to partake of what it can offer. In a typical gesture, Rilke points out that such a stance toward life might call for exceptions and that he, for one, has not attained it. But tucked into this half-ironic aside might be the second lesson: there is no permanent stance that we might assume in life. We will always be at a loss about the next step when we allow ourselves to respond to life at its proper speed, without deciding in advance how fast or slow we want to take it. This is no different from Rilke’s understanding of how poetry must approach every subject on its own terms and achieve a state where the subject’s and the poet’s different “velocities” coincide. Only then can it become apparent what the significance of a given object or person and place might be in our lives.

This is, then, not a philosophy of self-reliance and the admonition to “trust thyself” but a welcome to the ways in which you might surprise yourself and learn to relate to—and let go of— yourself in a less possessive spirit.

The Reception of Rilke

Of course, Rilke had been recognized as a major poet during his lifetime. He received stipends from the Austrian government and groups of donors, and some of his books sold relatively well. Because of his increasing need for anonymity, Rilke adopted the habit of refusing all official honors and awards. But because he sounded a new note in poetry and because this note penetrated even readers intoxicated by the shrill excitements of expressionist verse, prose, and theater exploding all over Europe at this time, there was also resistance. Already in the 1920s, Rilke’s readers were disparaged as young girls and old maids. Rilke had made it a habit never to read criticism or reviews of his work. “Which does not mean,” he clarified, “that I have not drawn joy and advantage from the warmth of an occasional personal agreement, or even someone disagreeing with my artistic aims as it finds expression in an intimate conversation. Such influences originate in life—and to resist them at any point I have never considered.” Rilke broke his vow of silence only once with regard to an insinuation that he had betrayed the German language when he published a cycle of poems in French in 1925. He dismissed the charge as unfounded because “the German language had not been given to me as something alien; it works its effects out of me, it speaks out of my essence.” The background to this attack on Rilke was the postwar occupation of Germany’s industrial region of the Ruhr Valley by French troops to prevent Germany’s rearmament, which many Germans deeply resented and which ultimately had disastrous political consequences. Rilke’s poetry, filled with chrysanthemums and unicorns and written by a citizen of the erstwhile Austro-Hungarian monarchy born in Prague, had become the lightning rod for German, anti-French nationalist anxieties.

The second clouding of Rilke’s stature occurred after 1968, when a new guard of professors in Germany rejected what they considered Rilke’s apolitical cult of Innerlichkeit, or interiority.