Volume 31, Number 14 · September 27, 1984
Rilke in Life and Death
By Gabriele Annan
Rilke: A Life
by Wolfgang Leppmann, translated in collaboration with the author by Russell M. Stockman
Fromm International, 421 pp., $12.95 (paper)
The Sacred Threshold: A Life of Rainer Maria Rilke
by J.F. Hendry
Carcanet (Manchester; distributed in the US by Harper and Row), 184 pp., $18.50
Letters to a Young Poet
by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell
Random House, 109 pp., $14.95
The trouble with Rilke is that he is not a poet for beginners (or, as Professor Leppmann bluntly puts it, 'the Duino Elegies are not everyone's cup of tea'). Still, beginners have to begin somehow, and these two biographies are intended to help them do it—or at any rate that is how they read. They use the same method, interleaving biographical information with discussions of the poetry. Rilke learned from other contemporary artists, especially from visual artists like Rodin and Cézanne; and also from Valéry, whose poetry he translated; but he was less influenced than most poets are by other poet's poetry. You cannot assign Rilke to a movement and study its program and practice as a way of approaching his work. Not that he did not have a program; but it was his own, homemade without a pattern book. (One of the most surprising facts to emerge from these biographies—in view of Rilke's polyglot literary culture—is how defective his formal education was.)
Review, 3902 words
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