Because in his correspondence Rilke hopes to reach individuals of varying perspective and backgrounds, he often invents several ways of expressing similar or even identical thoughts. To be heard by his correspondents, Rilke abandons established ways of saying things and in this process deepens and frequently expands his own insights and his language. Some of the passages in Rilke’s letters are so vibrant, creative, and rhetorically animated because there Rilke surprised himself with a discovery that could not have been planned.

Wherever an individual’s philosophy develops into a system, I experience the almost depressing feeling of a limitation, of a deliberate effort. I try to encounter the human each time at that point where the wealth of his experiences still realizes itself in many disparate and distinct ways without coherence and without being curtailed by the limitations and concessions that systematic orders ultimately require.

Rilke’s willingness to recognize all facets of existence and experience without relying on any metatheoretical framework, as provided by theology or the humanities, results in a double focus. On one level, there is Rilke’s unceasing and yet patient quest to determine what allows us to assume that life might have a meaning beyond our mere material existence. And, as a contrapuntal theme, there is his equally diligent dedication to account for the irreducible uniqueness of existence and thus also precisely for the physical and material aspects of our being in the world. Rilke was attuned to two different melodies (a metaphor for poetry of which he was fond): one a cosmic bass line underscoring all creation and the other a melody that consists of the chatter and talk of everyday people in common situations. In his letters, he succeeds in achieving unusual harmonies composed of these two very different lines: he can be talky and transcendent in the same phrase, at once full of deep wisdom and subtle irony in one paragraph.

The center and heart of Rilke’s letters are his reflections on love and death (the heart, of course, being one of Rilke’s essential metaphors and literal concerns: possibly more than other poets, Rilke felt that rhymed language links us in fundamental ways to the biorhythms of lung and heart). Love and death, of course, are also the great themes of Rilke’s poetry. In his novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, completed after his first long stay in Paris in 1908 and meant to record the experience of survival in that disorienting, alienating, and yet abundantly alive city, the narrator begins with the startling matter-of-fact observation that “people come here to die.” (No less startling for a book of such profound reflections on death and loss of innocence in modernity is the fact that the first entry written in 1907 is marked, in an uncanny coincidence sometimes achieved by literature, “September 11th, Rue Toullier.”) The book ends with a retelling of the biblical parable of the prodigal son who spurns conventional love for a kind of infinite striving of the heart that cannot know any aim, object, or end. In Rilke’s rendition, the prodigal son’s project becomes that of loving without an object—to love for love’s sake. To transcend the ego does not mean, for Rilke, to enter into a spiral of radical self-doubt and philosophical skepticism or to open the floodgates of unconscious desire and irrationality. It means to be swept up by the movement of one’s heart (or soul, if you like, or serotonin levels) without ever reaching a state where this movement will lose its purpose and desire by being fulfilled. In the Elegies, this thought is expressed in a tone that mixes urgency with earthliness.

Sometimes, however, life alone is urgent enough, and we may not need any more intensity. Instead, what many of us want is what Rilke calls, in a letter of February 10, 1922, “space for the spirit to breathe.” This is where the letters come in. They express in striking yet accessible images Rilke’s conviction that “our heart always exceeds us” (second Duino Elegy) and give us precisely that “space for the spirit to breathe” with a patience, mindfulness, and near serenity that befits a conversation between individuals who have trust and hope in each other but are not encumbered by too much intimacy (or baggage, as we may phrase it today).

These letters also introduce us to refreshingly un-Rilkean metaphors. In describing a disappointing return visit to his home-town of Prague in 1911, Rilke calls himself a “rocket that has ended up in the bushes, huffing and puffing but to no one’s enjoyment.” In addition to “Rilke the rocket,” there’s Rilke—in his own words—“the sad and repugnant caterpillar,” “the chrysalis in its cocoon,” “the tree in winter without a single word-leaf,” “the deaf mountain, quite rocky,” “the photographic plate that’s been exposed too long,” “the student of life who is held back a grade for failing his classes.” All of these slightly mocking self-descriptions allow Rilke to share wisdom while being neither preachy nor prophetic, yet still deeply poetic: regardless of what theme he is discussing, the poet reveals himself in these passages to be a sage of immanence.

Rilke’s Aesthetics

Rilke’s work constitutes a turning point and an anomaly in the tradition of modern poetry. He is at once a committed formalist, a master of the most intricate rhymes adapted to traditional poetic forms, and yet someone who responds explicitly to the social realities of alienation in a consumerist mass society. Much of Rilke’s reputation and influence, especially among later poets, rests on his formalism. It is most often associated with New Poems, where one finds Rilke’s exacting poetic renderings of animals, paintings, inanimate objects, and individuals that he observed at museums, during zoo visits, and in the city of Paris. The perplexing strength of Rilke’s poetry, however, results from how this artful and self-consciously formal reflection on the proper representation of flamingos, say, becomes a consideration of how to look at and, ultimately, how to live one’s life. “A flock of flamingos,” you ask, “imparting life lessons?” That is precisely the point: virtually all of us have a rather tenuous relationship to flamingos, mostly from visits to the zoo where they are fed a special diet to keep their pale feathers from losing their pink. But Rilke shows us that neither our frail connection to these birds nor their peculiar ornamental and slightly artificial-seeming status in menageries should prompt our dismissal of them as something less significant than a woman losing her sight, or washing a corpse, or the nature of love (all other themes in New Poems). For Rilke, a poem’s theme is nothing but a “pretext.” His aperçus serve the ambitious and presumably prepolitical, or ethical, function of recovering what by the time we perceive it has been marginalized or domesticated or appropriated already by convention (for disdain, for entertainment, for consumption). Rilke insists that even the smallest or most banal thing might deserve our undivided attention.

But art is not unique in its recourse to a pretext. Rilke’s words concern not only aspiring poets and admirers. At any moment we all take respite from the overwhelming nature and challenge of existence by turning to “the pretexts of life,” which Rilke identified as the necessary effort to name and define things; to approach people with the crutch of titles and names; to play the games that reward us with recognition, money, even moments of happiness; or to break down and define our experiences as pleasure, pain, or joy. We often decide in advance how we will respond to something rather than wait for the experience to play itself out according to its proper speed.

It is true that even happiness can sometimes serve as a pretext for initiating us into that which by its very nature surpasses us.

What “surpasses us by its very nature” is that dimension of life in which Rilke wishes to remain, prior to feeling happy or sad about it, prior to constructing philosophical systems or ideologies above it, prior to composing a poem about it. He wishes to remain in this dimension, however, not to denigrate life and its many pretexts and the games we play but to recall that at any moment we and these pretexts might be surpassed by our being. His purpose is to alert us to what we are already initiated into but tend to overlook or forget.