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    Rilke was a Czech poet who published his first book of verse in 1894 after private tutoring to attend university in Prague. He then studied briefly at Charles-Ferdinand University before moving to Munich where he socialized in literary circles and had some of his plays produced. A decisive influence was Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen. In 1897 he met the married Lou Andreas-Salome who strongly impacted him. They spent the summer together in the Alps before Rilke accompanied her family to Berlin. His poetry collections employed impersonal symbolism to describe everyday objects, dubbed "thing poems." This innovative approach was very influential but he realized it did not truly understand living things. By this point in his career,

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    Rilke was a Czech poet who published his first book of verse in 1894 after private tutoring to attend university in Prague. He then studied briefly at Charles-Ferdinand University before moving to Munich where he socialized in literary circles and had some of his plays produced. A decisive influence was Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen. In 1897 he met the married Lou Andreas-Salome who strongly impacted him. They spent the summer together in the Alps before Rilke accompanied her family to Berlin. His poetry collections employed impersonal symbolism to describe everyday objects, dubbed "thing poems." This innovative approach was very influential but he realized it did not truly understand living things. By this point in his career,

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    Rilke was a Czech poet who published his first book of verse in 1894 after private tutoring to attend university in Prague. He then studied briefly at Charles-Ferdinand University before moving to Munich where he socialized in literary circles and had some of his plays produced. A decisive influence was Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen. In 1897 he met the married Lou Andreas-Salome who strongly impacted him. They spent the summer together in the Alps before Rilke accompanied her family to Berlin. His poetry collections employed impersonal symbolism to describe everyday objects, dubbed "thing poems." This innovative approach was very influential but he realized it did not truly understand living things. By this point in his career,

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    22 views1 page

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    Cecily Knights
    Rilke was a Czech poet who published his first book of verse in 1894 after private tutoring to attend university in Prague. He then studied briefly at Charles-Ferdinand University before moving to Munich where he socialized in literary circles and had some of his plays produced. A decisive influence was Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen. In 1897 he met the married Lou Andreas-Salome who strongly impacted him. They spent the summer together in the Alps before Rilke accompanied her family to Berlin. His poetry collections employed impersonal symbolism to describe everyday objects, dubbed "thing poems." This innovative approach was very influential but he realized it did not truly understand living things. By this point in his career,

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    private instruction toward passing the entrance exams for Prague’s Charles-

    Ferdinand University. In 1894 his first book of verse, Leben und Lieder: Bilder und
    Tagebuchblatter, was published. After a short stint at Charles-Ferdinand
    University, Rilke left Prague for Munich where he mingled in the city’s literary
    circles, had several of his plays produced, published his poetry collections,
    Larenopfer and Traumgelkront, and was introduced to the work of Danish writer Jens
    Peter Jacobsen, who was a decisive influence during Rilke’s formative years.
    Visiting Venice in 1897, Rilke met Lou Andreas-Salome, a married woman fifteen
    years his senior, who was also a strong influence. After spending the summer of
    1897 with her in the Bavarian Alps, Rilke accompanied Salome and her husband to
    Berlin in late 1897 and\\

    vision with impersonal symbolism. He referred to this type of poetry as


    Dinggedichte (thing poems). These verses employed a simple vocabulary to describe
    concrete subjects experienced in everyday life and would lead W. H. Auden to
    declare in New Republic that “Rilke’s most immediate and obvious influence has been
    upon diction and imagery.” Rilke expressed ideas with “physical rather than
    intellectual symbols. While Shakespeare, for example, thought of the non-human
    world in terms of the human, Rilke thinks of the human in terms of the non-human,
    of what he calls Things (Dinge).” Having learned the skill of perceptive
    observation from Rodin and, later, from the French painter Paul Cezanne, Rilke
    “sustained for a little while the ability to write without inspiration, to
    transform his observations—indeed his whole life—into art,” according to Nancy
    Willard, author of Testimony of the Invisible Man. The “‘thingness’ of these
    poems,” explained Erich Heller in The Artist’s Journey into the Interior and Other
    Essays, “reflects not the harmony in which an inner self lives with its ‘objects’;
    it reflects a troubled inner self immersing itself in ‘the things.’” But although
    this objective approach innovatively addressed subjects never before recognized by
    other poets and created “dazzling poems,” Rilke realized, according to Willard,
    that it “did not really open the secret of living things.”

    By this point in his career, Rilke was reaching a crisis in his art that revealed
    itself both in New Poems and his only major prose work, the novel Die
    Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge).
    These works express the poet’s growing doubts about whether anything existed that
    was superior to mankind and his world. This, in turn,

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