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Other authors named Rainer:
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Author's popularity: 1
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Vote: | All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Believe that with your feelings and your work you are taking part in the greatest; the more strongly you cultivate this belief, the more will reality and the world go forth from it. |
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Vote: | Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find these words. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night. |
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Vote: | For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. |
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Vote: | He reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there's another dog. |
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Vote: | I feel it now: there's a power in me to grasp and give shape to my world I know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it. All becoming has need me.. |
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Vote: | I have never been aware before how many faces there are. There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty. |
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Vote: | It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning. |
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Vote: | Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other. |
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Vote: | More belongs to marriage than four legs in a bed. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky. |
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Vote: | One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one. |
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Vote: | Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. |
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Vote: | Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems. |
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Vote: | Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further. |
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Vote: | The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing. |
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Vote: | The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maid, freed of all false feelings and reluctances, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will come together as human beings. |
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Vote: | The only journey is the one within. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things. |
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Vote: | There are quantities of human faces, but there are many more faces, for each person has several. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | There are so many things about which some old man ought to tell one while one is little; for when one is grown one would know them as a matter of course. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | There may be good, but there are no pleasant marriages. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Truly to sing, that is a different breath. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart. |
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Biography
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Rainer Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 in Prague, Austria-Hungary – 29 December 1926 in Valmont (Switzerland)) is generally considered the German language's greatest poet of the 20th century. Though he never found a consistent verse form, his haunting images tend to focus on the problems of Christianity in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety. He is generally placed in the camp of Modernist poets, though his religious dilemmas may set him apart from some of his peers.
He wrote in both verse and in a highly lyrical prose. His two most famous verse pieces are the Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies; his two most famous prose pieces are the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
Life 1875-1896
He was born as René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke in Prague on 4 December 1875. His childhood and youth in Prague were not very happy. His father, Josef Rilke (1838-1906), became a railway official after an unsuccessful military career. His mother, Sophie ("Phia") Entz (1851-1931), came from a well-to-do Prague manufacturing family (originally Jewish but later converted to Christianity to escape antisemitism). The parents' marriage fell apart in 1884. The relationship between the mother and her only son was encumbered because the mother had not got over the early death of her elder daughter and forced René (French: "The Reborn") into her role and tied him to her out of emotional helplessness.
The parents pressured the poetically and artistically gifted youth into attending a military academy from 1886, but he left it due to illness in 1891. From 1892 to 1895 he had private lessons to prepare him for the university entry exam, which he passed in 1895. In 1895 and 1896 he studied literature, history of art and philosophy in Prague and Munich. Once he had left Prague Rilke changed his first name from "René" to Rainer, perhaps indicating his discontent with his family.
1897-1902
In 1897 in Munich Rainer Maria Rilke met and fell in love with the widely traveled intellectual and lady of letters Lou Andreas-Salome (1861-1937). The ensuing intensive relationship with the married woman lasted until 1899. But even after their separation Lou Andreas-Salomé continued to be Rilke's most important confidant until the end of his life. Because she had trained from 1912 to 1913 as a psychoanalyst with Sigmund Freud she was able to impart knowledge of psychoanalysis to Rilke.
In 1898 Rilke undertook a journey lasting several weeks to Italy. In both following years he visited Russia. In 1899 he travelled to Moscow, where he met Leo Tolstoy. Between May and August of 1900 a second journey to Russia accompanied only by Lou Andreas-Salomé again took him to Moscow and St. Petersburg.
In autumn 1900 Rilke stayed in Worpswede where he got to know the sculptress Clara Westhoff (1878-1954), whom he married in the following spring. Their daughter Ruth (1901-1972) was born in December 1901. However, as soon as summer 1902 Rilke left home and travelled to Paris in order to write a monograph of the sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). The relationship between Rilke and Clara Westhoff continued for the rest of his life but he was not one for a middle-class family life. Besides which he had financial worries which could only be alleviated by drudging commissioned work.
1902-1910
At first the time in Paris was difficult because the foreign metropolis had many hidden terrors. Rilke later called on these experiences in the first part of his only novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. At the same time his encounter with modernism was very stimulating: Rilke got deeply involved in the sculptures of Auguste Rodin and then with the work of the painter Paul Cezanne (1839-1906). During these years Paris increasingly became the writer's main residence.
The most important works of the Paris period were Neuen Gedichte (New Poems) (1907), Der neuen Gedichte anderer Teil (Another Part of the New Poems) (1908), the two Requiem poems (1909) and the novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, started in 1904 and completed in January 1910.
1910-1919
After the appearance of the Notebooks Rilke fell into a creativity crisis that only ended in February 1922 with the completion of the Duinese Elegies that he had started in 1912. This poem cycle owes its name to Rilke's stay at Countess Marie of Thurn and Taxis's Castle Duino near Trieste between October 1911 and May 1912.
The outbreak of the First World War surprised Rilke during a stay in Germany. He was unable to return to Paris, where his property was confiscated and auctioned. He spent the greater part of the war in Munich. From 1914 to 1916 he had a turbulent affair with the painter Lou Albert-Lasard.
Rilke was called up at the beginning of 1916 and he had to undertake basic training in Vienna. Influential friends interceded on his behalf and he was transferred to the War Records Office and discharged from the military on 9 June 1916. He spent the subsequent time once again in Munich, interrupted by a stay on Hertha Koenig's Gut Bockel in Westphalia. The traumatic experience of military service, a reminder of the horrors of the military academy, almost completely silenced him as a poet.
1919-1926
On 11 June 1919 Rilke travelled from Munich to Switzerland. The exterior motive was an invitation to lecture in Zurich, but the real reason was the wish to escape the post-war chaos and take up once again his work on the Duinese Elegies. The search for a suitable and affordable place to live proved to be very difficult. Among other places Rilke lived in Soglio, Locarno and Berg am Irchel. Only in the summer of 1921 was he able to find a permanent residence in the Chateau de Muzot, close to Sierre in Valais. In May 1922 Rilke's patron Werner Reinhart (1884-1951) purchased the building so that Rilke could live there rent free.
In an intensive creative period Rilke completed the Duinese Elegies within several weeks in February 1922. Before and after he wrote both parts of the poem cycle The Sonnets to Orpheus. Both are among the highpoints of Rilke's work.
From 1923 Rilke had to struggle increasingly with impaired health that necessitated many long stays in a sanatorium. Even the long stay in Paris between January and August 1925 was an attempt to escape the illness by means of a change in location and an alteration in his living conditions.
Despite this, numerous important individual poems appeared in the years 1923-26 (including Gong and Mausoleum) beside a comprehensive and an as yet insufficiently praised lyrical work in French.
Only shortly before his death was Rilke's illness diagnosed as leukaemia. The poet died on 29 December 1926 in the Val-Mont Sanatorium and he was laid to rest on 2 January 1927 in the Raron cemetery to the west of Visp. He chose his own epitaph:
Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch, Lust,
Niemandes Schlaf zu sein unter soviel
Lidern.
Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy
of being No-one's sleep, under so
many lids.
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Rainer Maria Rilke".
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