Why Rilke, Why Now?
Why the poet who died in 1926 is newly popular in 2020
Rilke’s current popularity starts with his youthful vigor, and his generousity of spirit. What puts his work in the foreground of contemporary experience is his artistic challenge:
Look at the bars of the cage you are in, and change your life.
About what seems as if it was also one hundred years ago, when I was a college undergraduate, I wrote my senior thesis on Rainer Maria Rilke and translated twenty-five of his poems. I was attracted to his work initially by the soppy book, perfect for an adolescent, called, Letters to A Young Poet.
Letters to A Young Poet is a selection of ten letters that Rilke (age 27) wrote to an aspiring poet who was nineteen years old who had asked him, how to become an established poet. The letters were written during a relatively calm historical period. Both men were living in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, their correspondence started in 1903, and ended a few years later.
Rilke was such a nice guy in his letters to the kid, who was the same age as me when I first read it, offering him all sorts of advice, and lots of encouragement.
This was way before MFA programs and writing workshops and Master Classes on the Internet: “Find Your Voice. Tell Your Story.”
I still have my copy of the book, and what must have appealed to me is evident by what I underlined back then.
Use “the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory.”
What?! I was doing that! I’d be a famous poet, too!
“Do not observe yourself too much. Do not draw too hasty conclusions from what happens to you; let it simply happen to you.”
(I double-underlined those two sentences.)
It’s easy to make fun of the person I was at nineteen. I mistook Rilke’s kindness for confirmation of me and the awful poems I was writing.
(Looking at the book now, I see that I didn’t underline: “…let me tell you that your verses have no individual style, though they do show quiet and hidden beginnings of something personal.”)
Nowadays, nearly one hundred years after his death, Rilke has emerged as a poet for our time because he recognized that observation must take place before imagination.
In The Panther, I see the panther. Then can imagine being that caged beast.
His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly — . An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.
(Stephen Mitchell, translator)
Written in 1902, the poem was necessary before Rilke could demand that the reader must change in his poem Archaic Torso of Apollo (1908).
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. 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. 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.
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. You must change your life.
(Stephen Mitchell, translator)
In the United States, the culture revolves around the centrality of private needs and desires. However, we are in the early stages of a broad cultural shift away from the selfishness of what shapes the country, and Rilke presents visions of what that might look like.
In Duino Elegies, written after WWI, Rilke, miserable about the state of the world, wrote:
“What is more urgent than transformation?”
(Scott Haas, translator)
