The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

This is beautifully put together and translated by a man that knew where Rilke was going with his poetry and prose.

This is a profound and beautiful book. Ulrich Baer, editor and translator of the volume has gone through the more than seven- thousand letters Rilke wrote in his lifetime and selected those he felt had the most to say about living and loving in the world. He orders the letters into sections which begin with his title and are followed by a line from Rilke. 1) On LIfe and Living You have to live life to the limit 2) On Being with others To be a Part, that is Fulfillment for us 3)On Work: Get up Cheerfully on Days You have to Work 4) On Difficulty and Adversity The Measure by which we may know our Strength 5)On Childhood and Education; This Joy in Daily Discovery 6) On Nature It Knows Nothing of Us 7)On Solitude The Lonest People Above all Contribute Most to Commonality 8)On Illness and Recovery Pain Tolerates No Interpretation 9)On Loss, Dying and Death Even Time Does not 'Console' It puts things in Place and creates Order 10) On Language That Vast, Humming and Swinging Syntax 11)On Art Art Presents Itself as a Way of Life 12) On Faith A Direction of the Heart 13) On Goodness and Morality Nothing Good, Once it Has Come into Existence May be Suppressed 14) On Love There is no Force in the World but Love In his rich repetitive introduction to the volume Baer discusses the special place letter-writing had in Rilke's life and work. Rilke in his letters has a spontaneity and poetic freedom beyond that in his very disciplined and exacting poems. But of course the themes of both forms of writing are common ones, and the letters a source of ideas and inspirations for the Poetry. What distinguishes the Letters from another form Rilke used to great advantage ' the Diary' is the consciousness of the 'you' at the other end. Baer suggests one particular strength of Rilke's writing in the Letters is his nuanced awareness of the person at the other end, and his ability to reach out and feel and know how to express a message which will resonate in the heart of the recipient. Baer gives a picture of Rilke the legendary Poet- waiting for the fruit to ripen ,as most notably in the great period in which he suddenly in weeks time wrote the 'Duino Elegies' and 'Sonnets to Orpheus'- in contrast to the daily workman letter-writing Rilke. Baer underlines that Rilke expresses in the letters his own rare and special vision of life, one which conjoins the everyday with the cosmic, which feels in the rhythms of rhyme our inner rhythm of biology and mind, which senses in its internalization of the worlds objects a fullness of being and lived life. Baer presents the picture of a poet of holy immanence whose idea of the aesthetic is not in the pretty only, but who forges and finds beauty in the ugly aspects of reality also. Baer also tells the not always admirable tale of Rilke's personal life, the marriage to Clara Westhoff, the birth of their sole daughter Ruth, Rilke's abandonment of them, his seeking out his own fate but not without his fawning at