He responded invariably to a letter regardless of the sender’s station if he felt that the mailing, even from an unknown individual, “spoke to him.” In the excerpts selected for this book, Rilke reveals his thoughts about political revolutions, the role of god for modern man, the Catholic Church, Islam and religion in general, and the medical profession. He expounds on love and life; on sickness, death, and loss; on childhood, difficulties, adversity, joys, and work; on belief and art and language; and on friendship, marriage, and simply being with others.

There is something exhilarating about reading Rilke’s letters and witnessing Rilke’s mind simultaneously at ease and at work. We discover an unknown side of Rilke through his letters. Although he was an innovator and iconoclast in verse, Rilke’s letters are ultimately more urgent performances because they were not intended to reach the educated, poetry-reading public as a new set of self-consciously modernist, sublimely sculpted artworks. In the letters, Rilke searches out every angle of that celebrated inner life from which his poetry is born and which presents many readers, when they encounter it in Rilke’s precise yet accessible prose, with the startling insight that they, too, possess more interiority than they had assumed. Only readers who jealously guard Rilke as the domain of poetry experts alone or who are tethered to the porcelain figure of Rilke-the-sage-of-golden-afternoon-wisdom will profess surprise at the real-life applicability—yes, even usefulness— of his frequently trenchant observations in the correspondence. For there exists a fundamental continuity between Rilke’s exhorting the readers of his poetry to experience life as if each moment were something new and his tough-minded and lucid analysis of the human condition in his letters creating space for this exact appreciation of existence.

The Poet’s Guide to Life presents for the first time in English translation excerpts chosen from Rilke’s roughly seven thousand German and French letters in print (his total correspondence, still waiting for publication and, in some cases, the expiration of copyrights held by addressees, is estimated to encompass about eleven thousand letters). In his last will, Rilke declared every single one of his letters to be as much a part of his work as each of his many poems, and he authorized publication of the entire correspondence. But before this official legitimation of his daily writing as part of the oeuvre, his letters’ recipients had long grasped that they held in their hands another Rilke whose voice rivaled in significance that heard in the poetry. Already at the age of seventeen, Rilke had professed a preference for writing letters over verse to reach his addressee in ways not secured by poetry: “I could tell you all of this in verse—and although verses have become second nature to me, the artless, simple—but richly expressive word [of a letter] issues more easily from my heart—to reach your heart,” he writes on May 2, 1893, to his first love Valery von David-Rhonfeld. In this poignant distinction between letters and verse, Rilke coyly suggests that his beloved recipient calls forth his turn to prose. The irony, of course, is that if poetry had become Rilke’s “second nature,” the letters were now more valued according to Rilke himself because they occasioned new and unexpected expressions. More significantly, Rilke’s desire to reach his addressee without artifice or rhetoric emerges here: when Rilke has something urgent and intimate to impart, he takes recourse to the “artless, simple” letter rather than verse. Indeed all of Rilke’s letters, and not only this early instance, originate in the desire to address the other directly as “you.” Whereas his poetry reaches far beyond any calculable recipient, his letters invite and locate the other within what Rilke calls the “ever-widening circles” of his existence. By attributing to his letters a different capacity for reaching the other, Rilke reveals to his recipients, with as much force as his poetry but less burdened by the formal conventions of the lyric, what could be meant by a guide to life.

Rilke’s Life: 1875–1926

A guide to life: what could this mean? And what could it mean to be guided by someone whose biography, which has become a shimmering myth in itself, does not exactly provide an example to be emulated? Rilke left his wife and child to become a poet and initiated passionate affairs with several women only to end those relationships when he felt the urge to return to his desk. He often overspent on his modest income from publications and lecturing and was forced to plead with and occasionally beg from benefactors and his publisher for advances, grants, cash gifts, and emergency loans. He was extremely sensitive to criticism, and though princesses, politicians, Europe’s most famous writers and countless enchanted readers heaped him with praise, one slight from an unknown individual could unsettle him profoundly. He abhorred organized religion and distrusted the medical profession; he died of undiagnosed leukemia in 1926, after suffering unnecessarily because he refused all but the most basic medication. And as much as he cherished solitude and independence, Rilke relied so heavily on the kindness of patrons that some moralizing biographers have scolded him for the distasteful bourgeois craving to belong to upper-crust society into which he had not been born and whose privileges he could not afford.

Rilke was born in 1875 in Prague to socially ambitious middle-class German-speaking parents whose lives never amounted to what they had envisioned for themselves. He was slated for the type of military career that his father abandoned in great frustration after failing to be promoted, but he dropped out of military academy after suffering for several years in the strict environment. He gained his high school diploma by studying with tutors, and by the age of twenty had published two volumes of poetry, edited a small literary journal, and fallen passionately in love with Valery. After a year at the university studying art history, literature, and philosophy, he fled the narrowness of Prague (also home to Franz Kafka and Franz Werfel, both of whom Rilke greatly admired) for Munich, where he continued his studies for another year. He resolved to become a poet and embarked on a period of emotional and artistic apprenticeships in the form of long trips to Italy and Russia with his lover Lou Andreas-Salomé, the older and far more worldly woman to whom Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche had once proposed marriage and who would be among the first female psychoanalysts trained by Sigmund Freud. Andreas-Salomé mentored and mothered Rilke and encouraged him to change his name René to the more masculine Rainer, and to practice a signature and penmanship with the verve and flourish befitting a poet. Lou proved a good teacher: already during his lifetime many of Rilke’s elegantly printed books bore no title but only an embossed facsimile of his carefully designed, seamless, flowing

image

Rilke traveled widely, met and fell in love with a young German sculptor, Clara Westhoff, and married her in April 1901 after she had become pregnant with their only daughter, Ruth, who would be born in December of the same year. After a year of living on very little money in a rustic farm house in northern Germany with Clara and their daughter, Rilke left his young family for the bright lights of Paris where he finagled a position as office assistant for the sculptor Auguste Rodin. Clara joined him in Paris for a while after leaving their daughter to be raised by her parents, but Rilke never returned to live with his family. While Clara remained a friend and Rilke conscientiously paid the living expenses of his wife and daughter throughout his life, he knew full well that he had been neither a good husband nor was ever a good father.

The years in Paris proved formative. Rilke became a well-known poet in German-speaking countries after publishing several volumes of verse, including The Book of Hours in 1905 (a series of immensely vivid prayers to god written with the fervor and swagger of an adolescent boy burning up with unconsummated, pent-up longing for real love) and the decisively modernist New Poems in 1909. In the latter collection, Rilke perfected his genre of linguistic still lifes, Dinggedichte, or “thing-poems,” which present a series of objects’ effects on the poet’s consciousness (rather than chronicling the poet’s emotional or cognitive responses to them).