In this blog post, we’ll provide a chronological overview of Rainer Maria Rilke’s life and literary world.
Life and Early Poetry
Rainer Maria Rilke gradually embraced the diverse cultures of Eastern, Western, Southern, and Northern Europe, developing a character as a “pan-European.”
Early on, he abandoned a pragmatic, goal-oriented life, withdrew from the tumultuous world, and adopted an attitude of humble, passive contemplation. In doing so, he viewed all things—stars, pebbles, plants, animals, and humans—as having equal value and felt deeply connected to them. He believed that God existed and acted directly within them, and he strove to find the divine lurking within the world and within himself.
His early poems were collected and published between 1894 and 1898; these poems were, for the most part, attempts to enter a world not yet experienced through a sense of brotherhood and devotion toward the external world, as well as through mystical empathy.
Travel and Regional Experiences
Eastern Europe (Travels in Russia)
Rilke’s experiences in Eastern Europe stemmed primarily from two trips to Russia in 1899 and 1900. During this time, he visited Tolstoy with his companion, Lou Andreas-Salomé, and also stayed at a farmhouse in a small Russian village. Lou Salomé was thirteen years older than Rilke; she had been close to Nietzsche and was a well-educated woman who was already married to a German scholar. It was from her that Rilke learned Russian.
The vast plains, the endless landscapes, the innocent faces of the peasants, and the countless statues of saints and rituals of the Russian Orthodox Church evoked a powerful religious experience in Rilke. Through this experience, he came to combine medieval mysticism with pantheistic dynamism, developing a sense that God exists not in a world beyond, but is present in every part of this world.
One of the results of this experience is ‘Stories of God’, a collection of 13 short, fairy-tale-like stories based on Russian folklore, which demonstrates that God is present everywhere and influences all things. Another achievement was a collection of prayers, completed in 1905 and divided into sections such as “Monastic Life,” “Pilgrimage,” and “Poverty and Death.” It depicts a Russian monk seeking an unnamed God through prayers, hymns, penance, and incantations.
Northern Europe (Wolfsbüde and the Artists’ Colony)
Rilke’s experiences in Northern Europe centered on his travels through Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, and particularly on his stay in Wolfsbüde, a small town between Bremen and Hamburg in northern Germany, from 1900 to 1902. Wörfswede was a village where painters gathered, and as he mingled with various artists and found peace of mind, he even dreamed of settling down there for a time.
There, he married the sculptor Clara Westhoff and had a daughter, Ruth; for a while, he attempted a middle-class life as a newspaper reporter. However, he eventually returned to his nomadic lifestyle. In his later collection of lyrical essays titled ‘Wolfsbüde’, written to commemorate his friends from the artists’ colony, figures such as Otto Modersohn, Fritz Mackensen, Fritz Obebeck, and Heinrich Vogelmann appear.
While he retained the pantheistic and mystical sensibilities he had acquired in Russia, under the influence of Wolfsbüde, he once again adopted an attitude of fidelity to nature and the physical world; from the Danish poet Jens Peter Jacobsen and various painters, he learned the ability to observe the forms of reality through the eyes of a painter. As a result, his poetry acquired a sculptural composition and visual power, and his 1902 collection ‘Poems of Form’ foreshadowed the 1907 ‘New Poems’. During this period, his mysticism shifted toward the mystery inherent in things themselves, and his eyes were opened to see through them.
Western Europe (The Paris Period and the Influence of Rodin and Cézanne)
Rilke moved to France in August 1902 and spent 12 years in Paris, making it his spiritual home. In Paris, he became acquainted with the great sculptor Rodin and developed a close friendship with the painter Cézanne. He drew such strong artistic inspiration from objects that he wrote, “Only Rodin’s objects, the objects of Gothic cathedrals, and perfect objects speak to me.”
His experience in Paris was markedly different from before; he was deeply affected by realistic and dark experiences such as death, destruction, poverty, decline, suffering, illness, and fear. As a result, the semi-autobiographical prose novel ‘The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge’ was born in 1910; Rilke himself regarded this work as such a profound inner confession that he reportedly felt it rendered the creation of anything else meaningless.
Furthermore, in Paris, he learned from Rodin and Cézanne a reverence for the rigorous forms of art and the relentless discipline of creative practice. Like them, he sought to approach the depths of things through humble and persistent devotion, and as a result, the essence of things sometimes emerged as symbols of human existence. For example, in the poem “Leopard,” the animal confined behind bars is interpreted as a symbol of a human whose feet are bound to the earth.
His representative collection of object poetry was divided into two parts and published between 1907 and 1908 under the title ‘New Poetry Collection’; the second part was dedicated to Rodin.
Southern Europe and His Later Years
His experiences in Southern Europe included travels through Italy, North Africa, and Spain, after which he returned to Paris. Following his stay in Paris, a long period of silence ensued, during which he devoted himself primarily to translation work.
In 1912, at the invitation of the wife of Prince Thurn und Taxis, he stayed at Duino Castle near Trieste; there, a new creative phase began, ultimately resulting in the “Duino Elegies.” When World War I broke out, he served in the military in Vienna; after the war, he moved to Switzerland, where he acquired a small castle and lived there until his death. In 1923, he published the aforementioned ‘The Duino Elegies’ and ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’.
On Themes and the Epistolary Collection
Rilke was a poet who greatly expanded the lyrical expressive possibilities of poetry.
Through the condensation of language, he sought to express even that which cannot be fully articulated or heard, and the themes he chose were primarily love and death.
His unique view of love can be summarized as love that sets the beloved free, love that renounces possessiveness, restrained love, and the concept of Eros directed toward that which is distant. Furthermore, he viewed death as another aspect of life and believed that only when death is unified with life is complete existence—that is, the “circle of being”—realized. He believed that within this unity, even the contradictions of life—beauty and horror, joy and suffering—could be affirmed.His collections of letters, published posthumously, are regarded not merely as compilations of correspondence but as works that encapsulate Rilke’s very essence and philosophy. Many of these letters were not written with a specific recipient in mind but were, in fact, his inner confessions themselves; they embody his efforts to define humanity’s place in the universe through devotion to God and the world.
