Art for Rilke's Sake

...Still, Rilke's life and work point to the resolution of an enduring paradox: that ours should be the century in which lyric poetry both reached its apogee of beauty and ceased to be an art of any consequence...

...Fifteen years his senior, she had been Nietzsche's lover and an early disciple of Freud, and was now (chastely) married to a brilliant philologist who took it well when Rilke moved into the family home in Berlin...

...After Kappus writes to bashfully explain that he has left the academy for a military career, Rilke surprises him with a generous vote of approval and congratulation: I am glad you have that steady expressible existence with you, that title, that uniform, that service, all that tangible and limited reality, which . . . not only allows but actually cultivates a self-reliant attentiveness...

...Books Art for Rilke's Sake By Christopher Caldwell Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is by general agreement the greatest German-language lyric poet of this century-indeed, of any century, by an agreement scarcely less general...

...We can no longer be sure that we love the lovable and abhor the detestable...

...At his bidding the soul travels as though through familiar land...

...And since Erich Heller's landmark 1957 essay "Rilke and Nietzsche," Rilke has been Exhibit A for the case that there's something awfully problematic about substituting art for shattered religious certitudes...

...Nor does Freedman, whose academic specialization has been Virginia Woolf, Andr...

...This is, for all its boiling priapism, a religious poem, a call to conversion...

...The regular, old material world, meanwhile, unsanctified by the artist-god, becomes "a slum to the spirit and an affront to the artist...

...Archaic Torso of Apollo" (1908) is the epiphanic expression of all Rilke had learned from Rodin: We did not know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit...

...Published as Letters to a Young Poet, it is the best known of his works in English and contains a beautiful optimism not only towards the poet's calling but also towards the things of this world...

...Rilke took to Russia in a way that he did nowhere else...

...Heller's anti-estheticism, his belief that literature is only a body of ideas, may be an apt reaction to the Duino Elegies, but they are an overreaction to the rest of Rilke's poetry...

...As Ralph Freedman, emeritus professor of comparative literature at Princeton, makes plain in his new Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 640 pages, $35), he was a little of both...

...But conversion to what...

...Good does no good and evil no harm...

...Looking to Rilke's own life, we find two consistent postures even across the years in which his poetry was changing profoundly...

...Nor did it dim his capacity for work: By his early twenties, Rilke had published two books of poems, founded a literary magazine, and written a number of bad Ibsen-like dramas, while exhibiting an uncanny ability to sniff out rich patrons that would never abandon him...

...The second is a tendency to pillage all his experience for its most poetic elements and to view all his acquaintances as steps on the ladder of his poetic ascent, whether emotionally, esthetically, or financially...

...Freedman's book is the most comprehensive biography of Rilke in English...

...But Rilke's work, particularly the ambitious and difficult Duino Elegies he wrote between 1911 and 1922 and which academic critics favor, is something more extreme: Art for Art's Sake, elevated to theology...

...It is on the minutely observed poems he wrote shortly thereafter that his reputation outside the academy now rests...

...Too comprehensive...

...And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power...

...he even learned the language and began reading deeply in its poetry, which would lead to a fruitful correspondence with the poets Pasternak and Tsvetaeva in the last years of his life...

...but on arrival it finds itself in a place where it never meant to be...

...He spent long hours reading in the Biblioth?que Nationale and visiting his wife's mentor, Auguste Rodin, for several months in 1902...

...A pseud par excellence, "Lou" (as no biographer fails to call her) was the source of many of Rilke's ideas on psychiatry and sex, art and society...

...In 1899 they went to Russia, the beginning of a peripatetic existence that would take Rilke from Berlin to Paris to Rome to Capri to the Istrian Coast to North Africa and finally to Switzerland-never staying anywhere for more than a few months, but never completely leaving any place behind, either...

...There is thus nothing modest about his calling art "only a way of living...

...And if they've all gotten together one night, you're looking at a very shaky world all thrown together any which way...

...Freedman is inclined to see Rilke's movement toward the discovery of a distinctive poetic voice as an unambiguous good, a model...

...He is a Mount Everest of translation: Because his poetry relies so heavily on the consonantal logjams of German vocabulary and the unpredictable fungibility of German syntax, and because it makes use of dozens of meters, both doggedly maintained and ingeniously improvised upon, Rilke draws translators by the dozen, who try to scale his heights simply because he is There...

...Rilke used people...

...Terror and bliss are one...

...to Robert Bly's of "People at Night" (1899): People are horribly disfigured by light, which falls in drops from their faces...

...Rilke is uniquely successful in evoking the traditional responses of the emotions to fundamentally new impacts...

...Yet in Rilke's hands, that meant cannibalizing every basis for human relations-religion, ethics, commerce, sex, love, friendship, conversation-to nourish the esthetic...

...And admittedly, the poetic results of his single-minded devotion are (employing a word to whose promiscuous overuse Rilke contributed mightily) awesome...

...At the artists colony of Worpswede, near Bremen, Rilke had an affair with the sculptor Clara Westhoff and married her in 1901...

...You must change your life...

...Similarly, Rilke's work in traditional European verse forms undermines his Nietzscheanism: What he says about destroying tradition is refuted by the beautiful and traditional way he says it...

...Art, too, is only a way of living, and, however one lives, one can, unwittingly, prepare oneself for it...

...Pampered, religious, neurasthenic, Rilke was sent away to one military school at ten and sent home from another, under murky circumstances, at fifteen...

...In 1897, a year after he had moved to Munich, the poet began his love affair with the Prussian salon intellectual and sexual adventurer Lou Andreas-Salom...

...Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared...

...Rilke was born in Prague to a declining branch of a German-speaking military family-declining to the point where his father was grateful for a job as a railway clerk...

...Rilke is, Heller tells us, the poet of a world of which the philosopher is Nietzsche...

...Gide, and Hermann Hesse, bring any skepticism to the high modernism in which Rilke wrote-the stuffy classicism of our time, which even today sets the terms for the creation of high art long after it has ceased to produce any...

...As Novalis wrote two centuries ago, an irreligious artist "can work in the medium of religion as though it were bronze...

...This would not stop Rilke from feigning an aristocratic pedigree for the rest of his life...

...There is thus little way for the English-speaking reader to determine whether Rilke was the giant of observation we read in Mitchell's translation or the prattling pseudointellectual Bly offers us...

...What he means is that, with the end of religious certitudes, it is the only way of living that can give any purpose to life...

...in all that is real one is closer to it and more nearly neighbored than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend proximity to some art, in practice belie and assail the existence of all art, as for instance the whole of journalism does and almost all criticism and three-quarters of what is called and wants to be called literature...

...A German book called Rainer Maria Rilke: A Chronicle of His Life and Work records what the pilgrim poet was doing on almost every single day of his adult life...

...Seven months later she bore him a daughter, and eleven months after that he left for Paris, having decided that family was incompatible with poetic creation...

...Rilke was inspired (esthetically) by the pious life of Russian monks to write his Book of Hours, which moved his verse not towards traditionalism but further towards modernism...

...The outside world intrudes little on Rilke in Freedman's recounting, which makes the book a long slog...

...By the first decade of the century, before reaching thirty, he was famous for a handful of books that, were they all he ever wrote, would have left him obscure today...

...Part of the answer is in the series of letters Rilke was exchanging at the time with Franz Xaver Kappus, a student at the military academy where Rilke had been so unhappy...

...Otherwise, this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur: would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you...

...The results vary, from Stephen Mitchell's rendering of "The Gazelle" (1907)to see you: tensed, as if each leg were a gun loaded with leaps, but not fired, while your neck holds your head still, listening: as when, while swimming in some isolated place, a girl hears leaves rustle, and turns to look: the forest pool reflected in her face...

...But then he began to find his voice...

...From Rodin, Rilke not only learned to think of poems, like sculpture, as built objects capable of radiating powerful messages, he also came to believe in art as a powerful force for order in all realms of life...

...The expulsion did nothing to dim his love of military pomp, which found its way into his early, more conventional poems...

...The first is a respect for craft and the life of action, visible in his adulation of Rodin and his admonition to young Kappus...

...Lou gave Rilke as long a leash as he gave her...

...at times it seems Freedman is merely trying to take that book and beef it up...