Rainier Maria Rilke lived a life totally dedicated to poetry and the world of art. His poems investigate the realm of the esthetic. This subject does not, to some readers (myself among them) by itself seem like the most fertile ground to explore: life, after all, offers us more than poetry. And yet to encounter Rilke is to be captivated: by the clarity and intensity of his willingness to look at the things around him, by his extraordinary commitment to the world in which he lives — a world made manifest in art, and to which every work of art ultimately returns — and by the wonderful music of his lines. His astonishing New Poems of 1907-1908 bring a new intensity of focus to poetry; his later poems, among them the sonnet series Sonnets to Orpheus and the monumental series of Duino Elegies, are among the high-water marks of twentieth-century artistic accomplishment.
Rainier Maria Rilke, the most important German poet of the first years of the twentieth
century, published a ‘breakthrough’ book of poems in 1907 called Neue Gedichte, or New Poems. Although he would go on to other great accomplishments in poetry — his “Requiem for a Friend” written after the death of his close companion Paula Modersohn-Becker (whose portrait of Rilke is reproduced below), his late inspired Sonnets to Orpheus and Duino Elegies), the poems of the New Poems represent one of the great achievements of modern poetry. Poems about objects, and thus about encounters with the world of objects, they push human consciousness to some of its limits. Powerful yet accessible, clear yet hovering close to the unsayable, these poems are among the finest lyrics ever written. To hear a discussion of seven of these poems, click on the portrait of Rilke.
The poems discussed are:
“The Panther”
“Archaic Torso of Apollo”
“Portrait of My Father as a Young Man”
“Self-Portrait, 1906”
“Going Blind”
“The Swan”
“The Last Evening”
To hear the discussion of Rilke, CLICK on this portrait.