René Karl Wilhelm Josef Maria Rilke (1875–1926,) who wrote with the pseudonym Rainer Maria Rilke, was an Austrian lyric poet. He is regarded as one of the most significant German-speaking literary figures of the early Modern period.
Born in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Rilke was much loved by his mother. She was mourning the death of an earlier daughter a week after birth, and dressed Rilke in girl’s clothing to seek to recover the lost girl.
Rilke later pushed himself to the limits of romantic love. He threw himself into many relationships and endless heartbreaks. He even abandoned a wife and daughter. He became the passive lover of many older women, including a princess and many intellectual and aristocratic women (including the psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé,) all in pursuit of the sweet agonies with which he could instill his writing.
Rilke’s first work was Das Stunden-Buch (1905; The Book of Hours,) in which death is a central preoccupation. It was inspired by his visits to Russia, and written as if by a Russian monk.
During a 12-year sojourn in Paris, he developed the ‘object poem’ used in New Poems (1907–08.) His poetic novel Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910; Sketches of Malte Laurids Brigge) is the portrait of a poet living in poverty in Paris.
During an astonishing three-week burst of creativity, Rilke wrote the Duineser Elegien (1923; translated as Duino Elegies, 1963) and Die Sonette an Orpheus (1923; translated as Sonnets to Orpheus, 1936.) In these best-known works, Rilke sought to define a poet’s spiritual role in the face of transience and death.
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For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Writing
This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
We see the brightness of a new page where everything yet can happen.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Opportunity
Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
And even if you were in some prison, the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses – would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories?
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Memory
Do not assume that she who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. Her life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, she would never have been able to find these words.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation … Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person—it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen … to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Topics: Wedding blessings, Difficulty, Love
A billion stars go spinning through the night, blazing high above you head. But in you is the presence that will be, when the stars are dead.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
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