In other letters, Rilke painstakingly explains—and thus also reassures himself—that the creative process needs peace and time unencumbered by guilt and pressure to produce and that even during periods of stagnation and apparent indolence an artist might be preparing internally what will emerge only later as his “work.” Early in his life Rilke was blessed to find a shrewd and endlessly supportive editor and publisher, Anton Kippenberg, the founder of Germany’s Insel Verlag, where Rilke is still published today. He made some of Rilke’s short prose available in inexpensive and quickly best-selling small books, returned all of his poetry to print during his lifetime, and wisely managed both Rilke’s money and his increasingly influential and consequently sought-after name by limiting permissions for anthologies and prepublication in journals. In his lifetime, Rilke enjoyed the passionate interest of numerous readers and critics. Only briefly in the early 1920s did his star threaten to dim slightly when his style of emotionally intense and dignified poetry had to compete with the shock effects of expressionism, surrealism, and Dadaism. (A similar brief decline in Rilke’s popularity occurred in Germany for a few years after 1968, when more overtly political poetry was en vogue and Rilke was branded a gilded icon of the bourgeoisie.)

Rilke’s life seems to have followed a rhythm whose beats are somewhat more widely spaced than the empirical events listed by biographers: publications, grants, reviews, and accolades; friendships, loves, and losses; trips, moves, and encounters with notables of his day. The details of his biography—his series of lovers, his military service, his travels, his complex relationships with donors, his engagement with the artists of his time—though fascinating individually, are ultimately subsumed into a greater cadence, a more expansive beat that often gets obscured by the details of most existing biographies. This greater cadence steadily pervades Rilke’s lines in both poetry and prose like the focused, silent breathing of a great yogi. In his poetry and prose, Rilke links through various images the affairs of human life to the movements of the cosmos itself. If this conceit seems hyperbolic, it is for Rilke rooted very deeply in his experiences of the world. The result is not esoteric, nor does it relativize and thus implicitly belittle human activity by placing it within a greater, superior—not divine—order. By seeing things rather within a larger, natural (rather than ideological or religious) pattern, Rilke achieves a fundamentally modern secular perspective but does not give up on the possibility that there might be something greater in our lives. Interestingly, Rilke finds evidence of a connectedness to larger, cosmic patterns within our physical, bodily existence. How we breathe, eat, sleep, digest, and love; how we suffer physically or experience pleasure: we are subject to rhythms we cannot totally control. Rilke relies on no ideational frame but understands our existence as that of decidedly earthly, embodied mortals or, in the language of the philosophers whose work he so significantly shaped and inspired, as beings in time.

Rilke can sound like a visionary when he writes on love. This is well known. When he explains how one might act during or after a serious disagreement in a marriage, or how a person may act on his or her attraction to someone of the same sex, however, he is rewardingly pragmatic, applicable, and decisively progressive. This is something nearly unknown to most of his readers: in his outlook on society and politics as evidenced by the letters, Rilke was a social progressive; some may consider him a radical. His views on art are no less advanced. They constitute an important counterpoint to both the romantic image of the poet as the “Santa Claus of loneliness” (W. H. Auden’s description of Rilke) and to an increasingly pervasive understanding of art during his lifetime in the terms dictated by the entertainment industries, the publishing business, and the art market. And when he explains the process of creation, perhaps slightly overstating his admiration for a patron’s success in commerce, he explains why he considers even the art of the deal to be an important and worthwhile pursuit in human terms. When he addresses such prosaic topics, he is persuasive precisely because he was not immune to, and consequently had true insight into, how life is lived today, which includes a keen, painfully achieved understanding of the business world and the rewards and pitfalls of public recognition.

Rilke’s Worldview in His Letters

In his poetry, Rilke’s deft intermingling of narrowly focused and expansive perspectives may take the form of the governing metaphor of “falling,” which allows him to present as a continuous movement the falling of the autumn’s leaves, our own inevitable falling and demise, and the great and directionless falling of our planet through the vastness of space. In the letters, Rilke accounts for this expansive, space-creating rhythm in which he sought to place our understanding of life by addressing all the things that could not be properly assimilated at the time of their occurrence. To view things as part of an expanded perspective meant for him to acknowledge and live through the depth of their difficulty rather than try to eradicate them or spew them out on a psychoanalyst’s couch “in chunks of the unusable or misunderstood remnants of childhood.” For someone like him committed to living the examined life, the only way to conduct this inspection was to write about it. “Time,” he writes in another letter, “even time itself does not ‘console,’ as people say superficially; at best it puts things in their place and creates order.” The guidance offered by Rilke, then, is not a quick fix but an adjustment that requires work, participation, mindfulness, and patience.

Rilke was not just serious but often ruthless about carving space for writing out of the marble of the day. “I know that I cannot cut my life out of the fates with which it has grown intertwined,” Rilke writes in a 1903 letter to Andreas-Salomé about his decision to leave his wife and young child, “but I have to find the strength to lift life in its entirety and including everything into calmness, into solitude, into the quiet of profound days of labor.” Rilke was too preoccupied with his work to make a good father or husband. A “guide to life” does not have to be established by example. Rilke himself preempted his critics’ tendency to focus on his biography and pass judgment on his life, with its damning decisions, difficulties, and sublime achievements, by deferring every question about it to his art. In anticipation of the judgment of later critics and biographers about the choices in his life, Rilke referred everyone close to him “to those regions where he had cast all of his talents”: his art.