Photographers Unknown, A Collection: Life Holds You in Its Hand
“So don’t be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all you do. You must think that something is happening within you, and remember that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don’t know what work they are accomplishing within you?”
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Born in Prague, Czechia, in December of 1875, Rainer Maria Rilke was a Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets. He was unique in his efforts to expand the realm of poetry through new uses of imagery and syntax and with an aesthetic philosophy that rejected the precepts of Christianity and worked to reconcile beauty and suffering.
In 1899 Rilke made the first of two pivotal trips to Russia, discovering what he called his spiritual fatherland in both the Russian people and the landscape. There he met Leo Tolstoy, L O Pasternak, and the peasant poet Spiridon Droschin, whose poems he translated into German. These trips provided Rilke with the poetic material and inspiration essential to his developing philosophy of existential materialism and art as religion.
Rilke’s verse became firmly fixed in his major poetry collection “Newe Gedichte (New Poems)”, with its verses becoming more objective, evolving from an impressionistic personal vision to the representation of this vision with impersonal symbolism. The major influence of this was Rilke’s association with French sculptor Auguste Rodin, under whom he worked as a secretary from 1905 to 1906. These verses employed a simple vocabulary to describe subjects experienced in everyday life, transforming his observations into art.
In the last few years of his life, Rilke was inspired by such French poets as Paul Valery and Jean Cocteau, and wrote most of his last verses in French. Rilke suffered from illness his whole life and died of leukemia in 1926 while staying at the Valmont sanatorium near Lake Geneva.
“Letters to a Young Poet” is a collection of ten letters written by twenty-seven year-old Rainer Rilke to Franz Xaver Kappus, a nineteen year-old officer cadet at the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt, Austria. Kappus corresponded with the poet from 1902 to 1908, seeking his advice as to the quality of his poetry, and in deciding between a literary career or a career as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army.These letters offer insight into the ideas and themes that appear in Rilke’s early poetry and his working process.
“Remarkable, this journey from the youthful music of Bohemian folk poetry… to Orpheus, remarkable how… his mastery of form increases, penetrates deeper and deeper into his problems! And at each stage now and again the miracle occurs, his delicate, hesitant, anxiety-prone person withdraws, and through him resounds the music of the universe; like the basin of a fountain he becomes at once instrument and ear.”
—Herman Hesse, My Belief: Essays on Life and Art, (A summary of Rainer Maria Rilke’s evolution as a poet)
