A Note on Rilke

I have read only bits and fragments of Rilke's poetry and his Duino Elegies is high up on my reading list ever since I came across the opening lines of the poem, the brilliant, heart-rending wail of loneliness: "Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?"

I had no idea of what kind of life Rilke lead, but I had assumed him to be a sensitive young man disappointed with all the banal cruelties of life as perhaps all poets are. But this review by Michael Dirda of Washington Post clarified some of the details. And it is not a pretty sight if you believe what he says:

Any fervent admirer of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) -- regarded by many as the greatest European poet of the century -- would do well to avoid Ralph Freedman's enormously detailed and scrupulously researched biography: On page after page it portrays one of the most repugnant human beings in literary history. As John Berryman so aptly put it: "Rilke was a jerk."

Many writers may be eccentrics, isolators and obsessives, but they usually retain at least one or two admirable qualities aside from their devotion to art: Think of Joyce's and Nabokov's love of family, Flaubert's stringent work ethic, Zola's political courage, James's kindliness. Even the most problematic moderns -- such as Pound and Celine -- can earn our sometimes grudging sympathy. But Rilke the man is hard to pardon or excuse.

Paradoxically, though, the author of the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus (both 1923) has long been viewed as a saint of modern art, a man who dwelt alone in a perpetual solitude of the soul, who made himself into a sensitive Aeolian harp for the shifting winds of poetry. Yes, he was ruthless to others as he was to himself and yes, he shamelessly flattered rich aristos, but a poet has to live somehow. Isn't "Orpheus. Euridice. Hermes" worth a few broken hearts and a heap of rich women's gold?

A tricky question.Yet Life of a Poet makes clear that this hollow-eyed communer with angels, Greek torsos and death was not merely a selfish snob; he was also an anti-Semite, a coward, a psychic vampire, a crybaby. He was a son who refused to go to his dying father's bedside, a husband who exploited and abandoned his wife, a father who almost never saw his daughter and who even stole from a special fund for her education to pay for his first-class hotel rooms. He was a seducer of other men's wives, a pampered intellectual gigolo, and a virtual parody of the soulful artiste who deems himself superior to ordinary people because he is so tenderly sensitive, a delicate blossom easily punished by a passing breeze or sudden frost.