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Rainer Maria Rilke

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The Poet Who Dressed as a Girl

Before he became one of the most influential poets in the German language, Rainer Maria Rilke was a doll. His mother dressed him in fine clothes and treated him as a girl, desperately trying to replace the infant daughter she had lost just a week after birth. The boy who would later write searing meditations on angels and death spent his early years as a living substitute for a ghost.

This is not the typical beginning of a literary biography. But Rilke was never typical.

Born René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke in Prague in 1875, he entered a world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at its twilight. Prague then belonged to the Kingdom of Bohemia, ruled from Vienna. His father had failed as a military officer and settled into work as a railway official. His mother came from money—the Entz-Kinzelbergers of Prague—and raised her son in comfortable circumstances on Herrengasse, now called Panská Street.

The marriage dissolved when Rilke was nine. His childhood had already been damaged goods.

Military School and Its Scars

What happens when you take an artistically gifted boy who was raised as a girl and send him to military academy? Nothing good.

Rilke's parents enrolled him at a military school in Sankt Pölten, in Lower Austria, when he was eleven. He endured five years there before illness provided his escape in 1891. The experience left wounds that never fully healed. Decades later, when World War One forced him back into military service, even basic training in Vienna triggered echoes of that earlier horror. The trauma, he would say, almost completely silenced him as a poet.

After leaving the military academy, he bounced around—a trade school in Linz, tutoring in Prague, eventually passing his university entrance exams in 1895. He studied literature, art history, and philosophy before abandoning formal education entirely and moving to Munich in 1896.

He was twenty years old and ready to become someone else.

Lou: The Woman Who Renamed Him

In Munich, Rilke met Lou Andreas-Salomé. She was older, married, brilliantly intellectual, widely traveled. She had been a close friend of Friedrich Nietzsche and would later train as a psychoanalyst under Sigmund Freud himself. She looked at the young poet named René and decided he needed a different name.

Rainer, she said. More masculine. More forceful. More Germanic.

He agreed. He was always susceptible to transformation by powerful women.

Their love affair lasted from 1897 to 1900, but their connection persisted for the rest of Rilke's life. She became his most important confidante, the person he could tell anything. When she studied psychoanalysis with Freud, she shared what she learned with Rilke. Their correspondence continued until his death.

With Lou and her husband Friedrich Carl Andreas—yes, her husband came along—Rilke traveled to Russia in 1899. They met Leo Tolstoy, the towering novelist of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then in his final decades. The following year, Rilke and Lou returned to Russia alone, visiting Moscow and Saint Petersburg. They met the family of Boris Pasternak, who was then just a child but would grow up to write Doctor Zhivago. They also encountered Spiridon Drozhzhin, a peasant poet whose existence seemed to embody some ideal of authentic creative life close to the land.

Russia seeped into Rilke's consciousness. Scholars cite the cultures of Bohemia and Russia as the twin foundations of his poetic sensibility.

The Artists' Colony and Marriage

In 1900, Rilke stayed at an artists' colony in Worpswede, a village in northern Germany that had become a gathering place for painters seeking to work directly from nature. There he met two women who would shape his life: the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, who would later create his portrait in a proto-expressionist style, and the sculptor Clara Westhoff.

He married Clara the following year. Their daughter Ruth was born in December 1901.

The marriage was unusual from the start. Within months, Rilke left home and traveled to Paris to write about the sculptor Auguste Rodin. Clara soon followed, leaving their infant daughter with her parents. They never quite divorced—the bureaucratic machinery of Catholic marriage prevented that—but they never quite lived together either. Their relationship persisted in its strange form until Rilke's death.

Paris: The Transformation

Paris was difficult at first. Rilke drew on this struggle for the opening sections of his only novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. But the city also electrified him. He encountered modernism in its full intensity: the sculpture of Rodin, the paintings of Paul Cézanne.

Rilke served as Rodin's secretary for a time, wrote lectures and a long essay about the master's work. From Rodin he learned something that would fundamentally alter his poetry: the value of objective observation. Look at the thing itself. See it clearly. Render it precisely.

This sounds simple. It was revolutionary.

Rilke's earlier poetry had been subjective, sometimes incantatory—the young man's voice crying out from within. Under Rodin's influence, he developed something new in European literature. The result was his New Poems, famous for what critics call "thing-poems." These were works that looked outward with almost sculptural precision.

Consider "The Panther," one of his most influential poems. It describes life from the perspective of an animal in a zoo, focusing more on the cage than on any human observer. This was genuinely unusual for its time—an early countermovement against the anthropomorphic tradition that placed human consciousness at the center of nature. Rilke corresponded with Jakob von Uexküll, a biologist who wrote about the subjective experiences of creatures like jellyfish and ticks, imagining how the world might appear to non-human minds.

Paris increasingly became Rilke's main residence through this decade. His major works from this period include the two volumes of New Poems (1907 and 1908), two "Requiem" poems (1909), and the novel he began in 1904 and completed in 1910.

The Novel of Anxiety

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is a strange book. It takes the form of a rambling narrative filled with poetic language—not quite a novel in the conventional sense, more like a series of meditations loosely stitched together. It includes a retelling of the parable of the prodigal son, a striking description of death by illness, a celebration of childhood freedom, and a chilling passage about how people wear false faces with one another.

The book drew on Expressionism, that movement in European art and literature that emphasized subjective emotional experience over objective reality. Rilke had been inspired by a Norwegian writer named Sigbjørn Obstfelder and by the Danish novelist Jens Peter Jacobsen, whose work Niels Lyhne traced the fate of an atheist in a merciless world.

Through Lou Andreas-Salomé, Rilke had come to know the writings of Nietzsche. The influence shows. The Notebooks probes existential themes—the quest for individuality, the significance of death, the experience of time as death approaches. Combined with the visual techniques Rilke had learned from Cézanne and Rodin, the novel conjures images of human anxiety and alienation in the face of an increasingly scientific, industrial world.

The Castle and the Elegies

Between October 1911 and May 1912, Rilke stayed at Castle Duino, a fortress perched on cliffs above the Adriatic Sea near Trieste. His host was Princess Marie of Thurn und Taxis, a patron of the arts who recognized his genius.

There, in 1912, he began what would become his masterwork: the Duino Elegies.

He did not finish them for a decade.

Rilke had developed an admiration for El Greco, the Renaissance painter known for his elongated figures and mystical intensity. He visited Toledo in Spain to see El Greco's paintings during the winter of 1912 and 1913. Some scholars suggest that El Greco's way of depicting angels influenced Rilke's conception of the angel in the Elegies—not the comforting angels of Christmas cards, but something vast and terrifying, forces of such intensity that they could destroy a human being merely by their presence.

The first lines of the first elegy establish the tone: "Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the orders of angels?"

War and Silence

World War One caught Rilke in Germany. He could not return to Paris, where his property was confiscated and auctioned. He spent most of the war years in Munich, had a turbulent affair with the painter Lou Albert-Lasard, and tried to maintain some semblance of creative life.

In early 1916, he was called up for military service. Basic training in Vienna. The return of old horrors.

Influential friends intervened. He was transferred to the War Records Office and discharged in June 1916. But the damage was done. The military experience, echoing the trauma of his boyhood academy, nearly silenced him completely as a poet.

The Elegies remained unfinished. A creativity crisis had set in.

Switzerland: The Completion

On June 11, 1919, Rilke left Munich for Switzerland. The official reason was a lecture invitation in Zurich. The real reason was escape—from post-war chaos in Germany, from his own paralysis, toward some hope of completing his life's work.

Finding a place to live proved agonizing. He drifted through Soglio, Locarno, Berg am Irchel. He met Baladine Klossowska, a Polish-German painter who would remain his companion until his death. Finally, in mid-1921, he found the Château de Muzot, a medieval tower in the commune of Veyras, near Sierre in the Valais region.

And then something broke open.

In February 1922, in an intense burst that Rilke described as "a savage creative storm," he completed the Duino Elegies. Ten years of struggle ended in a few frantic weeks. Around this same period, he also wrote both parts of the Sonnets to Orpheus—fifty-five complete sonnets exploring themes of death, transformation, and poetry itself.

Together, the Elegies and the Sonnets are generally considered the pinnacle of Rilke's achievement.

His patron Werner Reinhart bought the Château de Muzot and renovated it so Rilke could live there rent-free. Reinhart also introduced him to Alma Moodie, an Australian violinist whose playing left Rilke awestruck. "What a sound, what richness, what determination," he wrote. "That and the Sonnets to Orpheus, those were two strings of the same voice."

The Politics of a Poet

Rilke's political life was more complicated than his reputation as an ethereal mystic might suggest.

He supported the Russian Revolution of 1917. He supported the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919—a revolutionary government in Munich that lasted only a few weeks before being crushed by the right-wing Freikorps. He became friends with the expressionist playwright Ernst Toller and mourned the deaths of Rosa Luxemburg, Kurt Eisner, and Karl Liebknecht, left-wing leaders who were murdered in the violent suppression of revolutionary movements in Germany.

Rilke confided that of the five or six newspapers he read daily, those on the far left came closest to his own views. He developed a reputation as a supporter of left-wing causes.

But after the Bavarian Republic fell, fear made him more cautious. He became reticent about politics, worried for his own safety.

Then, in January and February 1926, less than a year before his death, Rilke wrote three letters to an Italian woman named Aurelia Gallarati Scotti—who was herself an opponent of Mussolini—in which he praised the fascist dictator and described fascism as a healing agent.

How to reconcile this? Scholars have struggled with the question. Perhaps the answer is simply that Rilke, like many intellectuals of his era, was drawn to intensity and transformation wherever he perceived them, without always grasping the practical implications of the movements he admired. Perhaps he was simply confused, or afraid, or seeking approval. Perhaps poets should not be trusted on politics.

The Book of Hours and the Search for God

Among Rilke's other major works, The Book of Hours deserves attention. Published in 1905, it consists of three complete cycles of poems exploring the Christian search for God and the nature of prayer. The symbolism draws on Saint Francis of Assisi and on Rilke's observations of Orthodox Christianity during his travels in Ukraine and Russia.

These are religious poems, but not in any conventional sense. Rilke's God is not the God of catechism. The divine in Rilke's work is something groped toward, intuited, never quite captured. The search matters more than the finding.

Correspondence with a Young Poet

In 1903, a nineteen-year-old student named Franz Xaver Kappus sent some of his poems to Rilke and asked for feedback. Rilke responded. Their correspondence continued for several years and was eventually published posthumously as Letters to a Young Poet.

These letters became Rilke's most widely read work in English. They offer advice on creativity, solitude, difficulty, and the artistic life. "Go into yourself," Rilke counsels. "Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart."

In the later twentieth century, self-help authors discovered Rilke. His words appeared in motivational books, on posters, in television shows and films. The mystical poet of angels and death became, improbably, a source of popular inspiration.

Final Years: Illness and Roses

From 1923 onward, Rilke struggled increasingly with health problems. He spent long periods at a sanatorium in Territet, near Montreux on Lake Geneva. A stay in Paris from January to August 1925 was an attempt to escape his illness through a change of scene.

It did not work.

Despite declining health, he continued to write. Important individual poems appeared in these final years, including works titled "Gong" and "Mausoleum." He also produced a significant body of poetry in French—a notable achievement for a German-language poet. His French collection Vergers was published in 1926.

In 1924, a young poet named Erika Mitterer began writing poems to Rilke. He responded with approximately fifty poems of his own, calling her verse a "Herzlandschaft"—a landscape of the heart. This was the only productive poetic collaboration of his career. Mitterer visited him in November 1925, and their correspondence in verse was eventually published in 1950.

Shortly before his death, Rilke's illness was finally diagnosed as leukemia. Ulcerous sores appeared in his mouth. Pain troubled his stomach and intestines. His spirits sank.

On December 29, 1926, with his eyes open, he died in the arms of his doctor at the Valmont Sanatorium in Switzerland. He was fifty-one years old.

He was buried on January 2, 1927, in the cemetery at Raron, a village to the west of Visp. He had chosen his own epitaph, a brief poem.

A myth developed around his death involving roses. The story goes that while gathering flowers to honor a visitor—an Egyptian woman named Nimet Eloui Bey—Rilke pricked his hand on a thorn. The wound failed to heal. His arm swelled. The infection spread. And so he died.

Whether this story is literally true hardly matters. Rilke had spent his life seeking beauty that wounded, transcendence that annihilated. A death by roses would have seemed, to him, entirely fitting.

The Legacy of Angels

The Duino Elegies are intensely religious, mystical poems that weigh beauty against existential suffering. They employ rich symbolism of angels and salvation—but not in any way that would satisfy a conventional Christian reading.

Rilke's angels are not the friendly beings of popular imagination. They are forces of overwhelming power, almost unbearable to encounter. The Elegies ask fundamental questions about human existence: the nature of consciousness, the meaning of death, the possibility of transformation.

After their publication and Rilke's death shortly thereafter, the Elegies were quickly recognized as his most important achievement. Scholars and critics placed him among the greatest poets of the German language, alongside Goethe and Hölderlin.

He remains widely read today, translated into dozens of languages. His influence extends beyond literature into philosophy, theology, and psychology. His work invites endless interpretation precisely because it refuses to resolve into simple meanings.

The boy who was dressed as a doll became, in the end, a voice that still speaks across a century. He learned to look at things—panthers in cages, sculptures, cathedrals, the movement of seasons—with an intensity that transformed observation into revelation. And he asked, in the first line of his greatest work, the question that haunts us all: who, if we cried out, would hear us among the orders of angels?