Volume 53, Number 20 · December 21, 2006
Letters from the Heights
By John Banville
Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé: The Correspondence
translated from the German by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler
Norton, 424 pp., $39.95
W.H. Auden once remarked, with wicked wit, that Rilke was the finest lesbian poet since Sappho. Unfair, of course, yet even the most loyal Rilkean will find it difficult to suppress an acknowledging smile. The poet is all ardent anima; his attitude toward the world is that of a tormented lover longing for the touch of soft lips yet secretly hoping to be pierced in some soft spot by a spurning heel. He is forever in an attitude of supplication, begging to be overborne—'Shatter me, music, with rhythmical fury!'[1]—yearning to take the world into himself, to be penetrated by the impenetrable:
Review, 4730 words
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