Rainer Maria Rilke throat-clearing - tomorrow, how about I look at a Rilke poem, huh?

Rainer Maria Rilke may be as un-Austrian an Austrian writer as I take a run at this year.  He was born in Prague and moved around his entire life.  He is more of a Paris writer than an Austrian writer, and he is associated more closely with Munich, Switzerland, Italy and even Russia than with Vienna.  Like his early influence Heinrich Heine, he was a citizen of – not the world – of continental Europe.  But he did attend the same military boarding school that Robert Musil dissected in The Confusions of Young Törless, and circa 1910 he experienced what now seems to me like the watermark event of the Austrian writer, a Crisis of Artistic Purpose.

Led to Rilke by Thomas Pynchon, I read Stephen Mitchell’s Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (1982) a long, long time ago.  I now have a clearer idea of what I got out of Rilke then – nothing.  Or at least not much more than that Rilke’s late poems were full of angels, that he was some kind of spiritual seeker (which I am not), and that he had a decade plus crisis during which he prepared himself for the angels or muses or a specific arrangement of neurons to reveal to him his greatest work, the Duino Elegies (1923).

While waiting, Rilke published two volumes of poems, numerous individual poems, worked on a daunting variety of translations (such as Michelangelo Buonarotti and Paul Valéry), and wrote hundreds of unpublished poems.  This is all aside from a constant stream of extraordinary letters.  But these poems were not the right poems, not the Duino Elegies.  “[S]heer mythologizing” is how Edward Snow, Rilke’s indefatigable translator, describes the “crisis” (The Poetry of Rilke, 2009, p. 657).

Two points, though.  The first is that the story climaxes in February 1922 when a solitary Rilke is overcome with another of his many recurring bursts of creativity and produces not just the Duino Elegies but The Sonnets to Orpheus, “letting the stream of sonnets wash over me like a deluge” (Rilke quoted by Snow, 647).  So here we have a vatic mode of poetic creativity likely not available to many poets, although how they have tried.

My second point is that along with living in the right surroundings, knowing the right people, and attaining the ideal degree of solitude, Rilke prepared himself for the arrival of the poetic gods by working, by an absolutely exhausting amount of writing that dates back to his teens.  I am the one who is exhausted, not Rilke.  This is not the image of Rilke I had been carrying around: Rilke as one of Europe’s most prolific major poets.

The other “crisis” in Rilke’s career, the other noisy silence, is at the beginning and is the creation of Rilke’s translators and critics.  “The Book of Hours (1905) is one of the strongest inaugural works in all of modern poetry,” writes Snow (p. 623), but he is having a little joke since it is Rilke’s eighth book of poems, the first dating back to 1894 when  Rilke was nineteen.  Snow begins his 600 pages of translations there in 1905; Stephen Mitchell did the same thing.  Competent but derivative is the common judgment, young Rilke working through his German and later French Symbolist influences before encountering Russia and Rodin and Cézanne and Lou Andreas-Salomé.

I suppose this is accurate.  What I am sure of is that by the 1907 New Poems, Rilke was publishing poetry that would have provided most poets ideas and problems for a lifetime of work.  For a few days I will pretend that it is 1908 and I have never heard of the Duino Elegies or The Sonnets to Orpheus.  New Poems and New Poems: The Other Part (1908) should give me enough to do.