Volume 30, Number 4 · March 17, 1983
Bleeding Poetry
By Stephen Spender
The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell, with an introduction by Robert Hass
Random House, 356 pp., $25.00
Many years ago, at a time when I was obsessed by Rilke's poetry, I happened to cut myself shaving, and (looking in the mirror) I thought: 'If Rilke cut himself shaving, he would bleed poetry.' Robert Hass, in his long, wide-ranging introduction to Stephen Mitchell's translations, quotes the young Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva writing to Rilke, when he was dying, in 1926: 'You are not the poet I love most. 'Most' already implies comparison. You are poetry itself.' Mr. Hass comments: 'This is not hyperbole.' He writes:
Review, 3015 words
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