Who is maria rilke

His Ding-Gedichte , or thing poems, focus intensely on an object in a distanced, sometimes unrecognizable, way, in an attempt to allow the object to express its inner being using its own language.

Rilke draws on characters from Greek mythology that he refigures in his own interpretations. There is only one way—go into yourself. Since then, his popularity has grown steadily. In the United States he has become one of the best-selling poets today, certainly one of the most popular German-language poets ever, and is often quoted in popular culture.

His work is admired for its almost healing vision of the world, and has been used by the New Age community for its mystical insight. Literarily, he has exerted an extensive influence, from poet W. Auden to postmodern novelist Thomas Pynchon and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content.

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It is here that he got inspired and began writing the book Duino Elegies although he took longer to finish it. On his second trip to Germany, Rainer stayed at Worpswede. The place is well known for a close-knit artist community. It is here that he went back to writing poetry and publishing a couple of his work which is less known. Rainer got married in the year to Clara Westhoff, a young sculptor from Bremen who had studied with Auguste Rodin. They had one daughter in December of the same year.

Soon afterward the two decided on a friendly separation to be free to pursue their separate careers. Rainer was a catholic, and although not practicing, could not divorce his wife. He later worked for Mr. Rainer was a socialist and supported the Russian Revolution.

He was very vocal at the beginning but later went silent about his political views. Due to the World War 1, young men were required to join the military. Rainer had no interest in the military and had a difficult time at the camp.

Through his influential friends, he was able to be discharged six months later, and he returned to Munich. Rainer was a religious man having grown up in a religious environment. He wrote poems about the life of Mary and the birth of Christ. He also wrote on humanitarianism through Christianity, he addressed one of his works to the saint Francis of Assisi appealing on him to help alleviate poverty among the poor.

The commission to write a monograph on the great French sculptor Auguste Rodin had brought Rilke to Paris. He served Rodin for a while as secretary, and he admired him more than any other living artist. Rodin taught Rilke not to wait passively for inspiration but rather to go out and look for subjects, to observe and study tangible objects. Rilke now developed a new concept of the artist as the hardworking craftsman. This new attitude manifests itself in those poems that appeared under the title Neue Gedichte , ; New Poems.

Here one finds his famous Ding-Gedichte thing-poems , poetic re-creations of things he had seen and observed and which to him become impersonal symbols: animals and flowers, landscapes, and, above all, works of art. During a trip to Sweden in , Rilke composed the first version of Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornet Christoph Rilke, a romantic, even melodramatic, sentimental account of the last hours of a young aspiring cavalry officer.

Later he tried to disassociate himself from this poem that became his most popular work. After the publication of his Neue Gedichte, Rilke set about completing an autobiographical novel begun in Rome 4 years before. In this, his only major narrative work, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge , he tells the story of his own inner suffering during his lonely Paris years. These were the years of an inner crisis, and in his utter restlessness and despair he moved from country to country.

Amid the profound hopelessness and frustration of these years, however, was one event which was to change Rilke's whole literary career: Princess Marie of Thurn and Taxis offered him the hospitality of her Castle Duino, near Trieste, on the Dalmatian coast. Here in he began to compose a series of elegies that were to become his ultimate poetic achievement.

They were not, however, completed until 10 years later. Freedman's Rilke, oddly enough, dwells on the dark underside of contemporary American life. Behind the mingled, multicolored yarn of his passions, obsessions, powerful yearnings, and self-interest--all wisely balanced in Donald Prater's majestic and definitive biography--Freedman sees only self-interest.

Rilke is "hucksterish. At moments Rilke's awareness of his self-interest amid modern anxieties appears uncannily precocious: "The pressures even in the preschooler's life were often suffocating.

He longed for change. I presume he got it from one of the mature Rilke's self-dramatizing letters, letters that Freedman paraphrases tendentiously throughout the book. That approach has the effect of turning Rilke's harsh and vain self-explorations into evidence of the "traumas" that Rilke spent a life riddled with "failure" denying. Indeed, Freedman writes enigmatically about "Rilke's pattern of living through failure as part of a process that turns denial into poetic art.

But no--if, for Freedman, Rilke is a slick little engine of self-advancement, he is also "thin-skinned," "fragile," "depressed," "thwarted," "troubled," "distraught," "schizophrenic," and "almost suicidal," and he suffered from "hysteria," "anxiety," and "insecurity. Freedman himself only occasionally glances at Rilke's art, and then with considerable lack of charm, not to say comprehension "Still addressing the woman's genitals in confrontation with the man's, Rilke weighed in with his most devastating critique of death's dialectic".

Freedman's Rilke is an almost wholly psychologized being. He has little existence outside his leaden states of mind. We rarely hear about the rich medley of artistic and intellectual influences on him--amazingly, Simmel's "The Adventurer" never comes up.

This is an extreme approach to the telling of a poet's life, but Freedman has a method to his extremism. As in a rash of recent despoiling biographies--John Fuegi's life of Brecht, Michael Shelden's of Graham Greene, Ronald Hayman's of Thomas Mann, to name just three--the author shortly puts his cards on the table: in this case we are going to meet Rilke the anti-Semite, Rilke the secret homosexual, Rilke the sexist.

The first strut of biographical art to buckle under such an avenging mission is language. He describes one doubly unlucky fellow as being "fatally electrocuted. One ugly phrase in a personal letter, for instance out of a vast personal correspondence , referring to Franz Werfel as a "Jew-boy," and some murky generalities about Werfel's "Jewish attitude toward his work," do not an anti-Semite make.

Rilke cherished the many Jews he knew, including Simmel; he enjoyed reading the Hasidic philosopher Martin Buber and steeped himself in Jewish Scripture, claiming that Judaism was closer than Christianity to God. He also remained a lifelong champion of Werfel's work.

And a reader discovers buried deep in Freedman's footnotes that Rilke wrote the offending letter to the poet Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, a good friend and an important patron. Hoffmannsthal was also Jewish, and he shared Rilke's negative views on the superambitious Werfel, who emigrated to America and, in , published The Song of Bernadette , a novel about a miracle at Lourdes.

Freedman doesn't mention that about five months after Rilke wrote the letter to Hoffmannsthal, along with a nearly identical letter to his patron Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, Rilke again wrote similar letters to the two of them praising Werfel's poetry so exuberantly that they almost sound like retractions of his first letters. Why would an anti-Semite extol a Jewish poet to two of the most powerful and influential figures in Central European literary culture--to his own patrons?

To paraphrase that great Jewish philosopher Thomas Aquinas, When you meet a contradiction, make a distinction. But Freedman builds from the surface contradiction. For Rilke, he writes, "a cultural and sometimes even a social anti-Semitism was part of daily existence. With similarly blind zeal Freedman bases his insinuation that Rilke was secretly gay on two pieces of evidence: the poet's idealistic adolescent pact with another boy at military school, "sealed by a handshake and a kiss," as Rilke put it in a letter; and a fictional letter meant for publication, which brought Rilke, in Freedman's weasel words, "close to a disguised rendering of homosexuality with personal overtones.

Well, so what if Rilke happened to be homosexual? I don't see what Freedman thinks he is gaining by making a near-assertion and then failing to prove it. If there are readers who might be obscurely benefited by the revelation of Rilke's homosexuality, they'll be disappointed. If there are readers whose identity rests on the affirmation of Rilke's heterosexuality, they will be shaken and then cheered. If there are readers who couldn't care less about the whole matter, they'll be bored.

Meanwhile, Rilke's ghost drums its fingers on some eternal windowsill, waiting patiently to be evoked. This is formidable revisionism. The cumulative effect of such a distortion of truth to an admirable, if sadly misplaced, idea of redemption and redress is to make Freedman's biography read like a forced confession. But the beating heart of Freedman's interminable deconstruction is Rilke the sexist.