Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke - Hardcover

Freedman, Ralph

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374186901 ISBN 13: 9780374186906

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1996

Synopsis

A biography of the German poet combines detailed interpretations of his life with an intimate reading of his verse and prose and shows how he grew from an ambitious versifier into a great poet

About this title

About the Author

Ralph Freedman is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Princeton University.

Reviews

Freedman, emeritus professor of comparative literature at Princeton and author of a biography of Hermann Hesse, notes in this thorough and thoughtful study of Rilke that he will follow "this tortured man" as he evolves from "a versifier consumed by ambition to one of the great poets of our time." He delivers on half that promise, by bringing to life the ambitious versifier far more successfully than he does the great poet. Rilke was born into a German-speaking family in Prague in 1875 and soon developed a pattern of illness-real and imagined-that persisted for the rest of his life. Other defining traits include a fawning pursuit of aristocrats (usually female), infatuations with Russia and Italy, intense love affairs (usually preceded by letter-writing campaigns) that ended in six months and a fondness for the company of artists rather than writers. He was, briefly, Rodin's secretary in Paris, and his wife-whom he soon abandoned, along with their daughter-was also a sculptor. Other familiar figures who appear are Andre Gide, Eleanora Duse and Franz Werfel. Readers will probably find Rilke unappealing, but Freedman skillfully reveals the various myths and personas the poet created about himself and perhaps even believed, and shows how in his masterpiece, The Duino Elegies, he shaped them into a new aesthetic "vision." Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Rilke's poems Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, among others, make him one of the great poets of the century. His day-to-day living, on the other hand, is quite uneventful and not particularly admirable, and Freedman (Rilke: A Biography, Random, 1988) does not enliven it. Rilke's passionate commitment to art was counterbalanced by a pathological incapacity for true intimacy that slipped into cold cruelty and a weakness for the ease and favor of aristocratic patronage, travel (with a tendency to misunderstand and sentimentalize the cultures he saw), depression, and illness. Freedman proficiently documents the movements, affairs, and preoccupations that served as raw material and provocation for Rilke's art. Yet the author gives us no real insight into Rilke's life or work. It is in the poems and other creations where the reader will meet the man. For academic libraries. [Rilke's newly published Uncollected Poems are reviewed on p. 116.-Ed.]-Richard Kuczkowski, Dominican Coll., Blauvelt, N.Y.
--Richard Kuczkowski, Dominican Coll., Blauvelt, N.Y.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374186901
• ISBN 13: 9780374186906
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 639