Yes, Rilke occasionally invoked his “calling to art” as an excuse for his failures. Yet he wanted to make absolutely sure that the way he lived was only to be determined by him. It is precisely this realization that lends his words their strength:

Do not believe that the person who is trying to offer you solace lives his life effortlessly among the simple and quiet words that might occasionally comfort you. His life is filled with much hardship and sadness, and it remains far behind yours. But if it were otherwise, he could never have found these words.

The force of Rilke’s counsel results from his determination to find the most precise words for what weighs on him and, as he puts it elsewhere, what twists and “deforms” him. His letters capture these dents and impressions left by the torque of life, and because of Rilke’s exceptionally fine-tuned ear and unusual willingness to explore his failings they attain great acuity.

The words in Rilke’s letters are lived words, in the sense in which we sometimes speak of lived experience: each word is something that Rilke considered having undergone and, indeed, suffered through. But every word in the letters leads straight back into life, placing the writer and his recipients inside ever-widening circles that know of no outside, beyond, or transcendent greater whole.

Rilke’s commitment not to avoid but to become cognizant of the contours of our difficulty finds its parallel in his views on art. His work does not constitute an aesthetic education where the appreciation of beauty leads one to recognize the truth. In the following excerpt from a letter, Rilke parts ways with the Romantic tradition defined by Friedrich Schiller and John Keats:

You know that what appears inexorable must be present [in poetry] for the sake of our greatest desires. Beauty will become paltry and insignificant when one looks for it only in what is pleasing; there it might be found occasionally but it resides and lies awake in each thing where it encloses itself, and it emerges only for the individual who believes that it is present everywhere and who will not move on until he has stubbornly coaxed it forth.

Beauty “dwells and is awake in each thing”: For Rilke, the search for beauty blocks our path to the true purpose of art, which is truth, or integrity and honesty, as he prefers to say. We must look everywhere, including in sites that strike us as unpleasant; in his life, similarly, he could not pretend to ignore the parts that did not make sense, hurt him or others badly, or that he would rather have denied, repressed, and forgotten—hence the large number of letters written to his wife, and his effort to understand himself as both an artist and a father. Rilke also ended the Romantic myth that the body must be given up in a feverish and ecstatic surrender as a sacrifice to art. Yes, Rilke had a body (he was of slight build, medium height, and considered himself homely), and he did not forget its needs when he was living the life of the mind: “You know that I am not one of those individuals who neglect their body in order to turn it into an offering for their soul; my soul would not at all have appreciated such a sacrifice.” He tried to listen to his body and translate its idiom into intelligible words. And he eschewed the seductions of ironic detachment and self-declared irrelevance indulged in by the modern masters. Without writing, Rilke’s letters suggest, we might fail to grasp what exactly happens and become numb to reality itself; we might accept the obvious and latent hierarchies around us and unwittingly acquiesce to unjust conditions, owing not to cowardice but to our failure to find meaningful expressions for them, and thus make them apparent to us. His search for the “simple and quiet words,” then, does not amount to quietism. “This having been earthly seems lasting, beyond repeal,” we find in the Elegies. There is nothing resigned about this statement. Rather, Rilke’s sense that one’s mere presence on this planet deserves affirmation fueled his commitment to search his experiences for a guide to life.

For this reason, Rilke attempted to cast himself in words: he had an urgent need to testify to his life in this world. “How is it possible to live since the elements of this life remain completely ungraspable for us?” Rilke asks in another letter. To the daunting nature of life and its difficulties, Rilke’s correspondence is itself an answer.

The longer I live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed into magnificent sense.

To transcribe “the whole dictation of existence,” Rilke renders intelligible to himself what seemed incomprehensible, enigmatic, unassimilable. He makes a dogged effort to capture every last little thing without deciding in advance its ultimate significance, between what may matter and what might leave but a smudge on the great scroll of being. The will “to endure” also means putting his preferences and needs aside, capturing his experience in words that will resonate increasingly as distractions fall away.

So far, and especially for English-speaking readers, this testimony has been limited to Rilke’s poetry; his single novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge; and a published fraction of his correspondence. Some of the poetry has earned Rilke the reputation as a difficult poet of transcendence. But already in the The Book of Hours of 1903, Rilke is an amazingly direct heretic. If a poem such as “I live my life in widening circles / I circle around god, the ancient tower” still seems theocentric, the impiety of Rilke’s utterly self-crafted and hard-won belief becomes evident in these lines from the same collection: “What will you do, god, when I am dead? / In losing me you lose your meaning.” Rilke believed that we may gain access to something beyond ourselves within and through ourselves rather than by reaching a higher power that supersedes and thus ultimately minimizes our own potential— the way an arrow on a taut bowstring is “more / than itself at the moment just before release,” or how “love is nothing but the urgent and blessed appeal for another person to be beautiful, abundant, great, intense, unforgettable; nothing but the surging commitment for him to amount to something.”

The image of Rilke as a poet of transcendence is as much a misunderstanding as the clichés of Rilke the healer; the self-indulgent scribe of solitude; the patron saint of adolescent angst; the seraphic, infirm poet crushed by the world. The most comprehensive “dictation” of Rilke’s existence, where he might discover that “small and inconspicuous” word that will suddenly transform everything into “magnificent sense,” as he puts it, occurs in his correspondence. These letters present Rilke’s wisdom without the patina of learnedness that has covered his verse over the years or the anecdotes that have encrusted it with biographical tidbits. These letters sparkle with insight and originality, they produce utterly unexpected turns of thought, and they converse with us: they are anything but monumental. Unavailable in English until now, they unsettle the ossified public image of Rilke as a slightly aloof, pseudo-aristocratic author of inspirational verse.