The perfect poet

Rainer Maria Rilke, born on 4 December 1875, is considered one of the greatest German-language poets to this day. When he died aged only 51 in 1926, memorial services were held across Europe and the poet was held homage to in countless obituaries. In a speech delivered in Berlin, the writer Robert Musil made the following oft-cited statement: “This lyricist did nothing but perfect the German poem for the first time.” 

Admired and controversial

However, Rilke was not without controversy. Bertolt Brecht, for example, denounced the poet as being “bourgeois” saying that he “ignored reality” in his writing. His colleague Gottfried Benn referred to Rilke’s poems as “rhyming plasticine”. Rilke’s critics thought of him as an apolitical aesthete and “favourite of the bourgeoisie” whose belletristic poetry dismissed the social conflicts of the time.

This type of criticism is largely forgotten nowadays. Rilke continues to be greatly admired and widely read around the world. His poem “The Panther”, his work “The Book of Hours”, his “Duino Elegies” and his only novel “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge” are well known, not only among German literature students. Rilke has also found his way into popular culture. In an interview, Lady Gaga said: “I read Rilke every day.” The American singer even has a tattoo of a German quote by Rilke written in curly letters on her left arm: an excerpt from “Letters to a Young Poet”. 

While many people love Rilke’s poems, not much is known about his biography. In his book “Rainer Maria Rilke. 100 Seiten” (Rainer Maria Rilke. 100 Pages) the writer Clemens J. Setz writes that some people worshipped him “like a saint,” even during his lifetime. Nevertheless, Rilke himself was never “at the centre of attention”. Rather than being a star writer, the poet seemed to be running away from something. Rilke was constantly on the go and lived in various places. He did, nevertheless, have many acquaintances he wrote wonderful letters to. 

René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke was born in Prague. His mother, who struggled to cope with her older daughter’s death, initially raised him as a girl. However, Rilke then had to attend the military secondary school in St. Pölten, followed by the commercial academy in Linz, before returning to Prague in 1892, where he studied literature, art history and philosophy. He eventually switched to legal studies and moved to Munich. Here he met the writer Lou Andreas-Salomé who had a great impact on his further development. She convinced him to change his first name from René to Rainer as a “more masculine” name. In 1897 he followed her to Berlin. 

Paris as his literary home

Nevertheless, Rilke went on to marry another woman in Bremen in 1901, the sculptor Clara Westhoff, with whom he had a daughter called Ruth. However, he was not interested in raising the girl. Instead, he moved to Paris in 1902 to write a monograph about the sculptor Auguste Rodin. Paris became a decisive place for Rilke’s writing, and he stayed until the start of World War I. He wrote his book “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge” here, as well as his “New Poems” (1907) including “The Panther”. 

These poems which are referred to as “Dinggedichte” (thing poems) are pioneering in the way in which Rilke focusses on animals, landscapes and inanimate object in particular and makes them “come alive”. This skill is normally associated with children, and Clemens J. Setz does in fact describe Rilke as the “greatest poet of child-like experience” despite never having taken care of his own daughter. Other typical characteristics of Rilke’s poems include unexpected rule breaking, expressions and metaphors. 

The fact that while Rilke is considered a “comforting poet”, as pointed out by Manfred Koch in the biography “Rilke. Dichter der Angst” (Rilke. Poet of Fear), appears to be yet another contradiction, as Rilke was not religious. He was not a Christian, despite the fact that angels play a central role in his “Duino Elegies”. However, these “horrible” angels were “not useful,” leaving people to their own devices. This sounds highly existentialist, and this is also how his enigmatic late works such as “Sonnets to Orpheus” are frequently interpreted. 

Rilke was buried at the mountain cemetery in Raron in the Swiss Canton of Valais, where he spent the final years of his life, before dying of leukaemia which was diagnosed at a late stage.