RILKE IN THE MAKING:
A COMPREHENSIVE STUDY OF HIS LIFE AND WORK ,
incorporating Volumes 1, 2, & 3,
has now appeared
(Fall, 2023)
See, for downloading,
or, alternatively,
*Also available at a University Library near you, or through the InterLibrary University Loan system.*
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N.B.
*On the significance of Rilke’s additional extensive association with Novalis in his life and work brought out exclusively in this book, see the extracts in the second half of this page.*
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Volume One
A POET'S FALL FROM GRACE (1897-1905)
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Volume Two
MEASURING LIMITS (THE DUINO MOMENT) (1905-1914)
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Volume Three
COMING TO COMPLETION (1914-1926)
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In part through critical biography, in part through a close reading of
almost all of the poems Rilke wrote, including many poems from
his Diaries, this large book challenges new ideas about what went
into the making of Rilke over twenty years of production, from his
early beginnings under the tutelage of Lou Salomé, right through, to
his famous final works, the Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies.
Volume 1 focuses largely on The Book of Hours; Volume 2 on The Book
of Images, the two parts of New Poems, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids
Brigge, and the first Elegies written while at Duino; Volume 3 on those
all-crucial, self-transforming ten years beyond Duino that lead up to
the Sonnets to Orpheus and Rilke’s eventual completion of the Elegies.
Two major theses are put forward in this book, the first touching
on Rilke’s well-known relationship to his former lover and mentor,
Lou Salomé, who is understood to have been a far more problematic
influence on him than we had supposed, the second touching on an
equally crucial and at some point saving influence on Rilke from the
literary sphere, which is shown to be that of the great visionary poet
who went by the name of Novalis. Behind the grand story of Rilke’s
poetic emergence lies the fundamental and long-standing reality of his
repression by Lou and what that would sow, paradoxically, by way of
a sublimated achievement as sublimely poignant as it is finally tragic.
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“My admiration for O’Meara’s close textual reading and analytical abilities in this Rilke text knows no bounds.”
{ Gary Geddes, editor of 20th-Century Poetry and Poetics, Oxford University Press, and author of Active Trading: Selected Poems 1970-1995. }
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II
On the significance of Rilke’s extensive, (technically) ironic association with Novalis in his life and work, we find this extract from the author’s correspondence with Gary Geddes:
“I am happy to think you have read through the Novalis book also, especially since that now puts you in the position to appreciate more how Rilke comes into a relationship with him as I present the matter in my Rilke book, if and when you get back to that book. Your trouble with Novalis is well-taken. If he has become a very popular author in some circles, this is not always for the right reasons. I wrote the book to offset these biases and to show that his was a far more troubled course than is thought. This sense you have that he protests too much and seems to want to impress, and is compulsive to the point of coming across as disingenuous, can be explained by the fact that he was an unusually fiery personality, as one of his friends famously remarked, all fire and enthusiasm, almost superhumanly so. His was not an ordinary drive such as mortals like ourselves know, and he is, in fact, thought not to have been an ordinary human being in anthroposophical circles, after Steiner's account of him. I am more ambiguous about the transcendental side to him than perhaps comes across in my book on him. My purpose in writing the book was to present him as faithfully and as fully as I could for what he was about, writing as a literary critic, if also with a nose for the transcendental impulse in his life from my experience of anthroposophy.
Same for Rilke as for his empiricist impulse.
Your terms, transcendental and empiricist, are useful tools to express what I make of all this. None of this is very easy. I think Novalis's transcendental is empirically based, Rilke's empiricism transcendentally based, but at the same time Novalis's empiricist is not Rilke's, Rilke's transcendental is not Novalis's. And how to bridge the two seemingly opposed worlds is precisely the issue I raise about them, and point to in my '“Orpheus” piece. I have not begun to address the issue and am not likely to in this lifetime. This issue is all the more poignant as Rilke himself seems to be aware of it in the depths, in his subconscious relationship to Novalis, as I present this in my book on Rilke, though he clearly insists on distinguishing himself from Novalis in the end.
Rilke has more of that desire for earthly things you would stand by and defend against Novalis. For my part, I do not really know where I finally stand in all this, in spite of the affinity I also have with Novalis, which goes back a long way in my life, as you know from ‘Bereaved,’ and is deep-rooted. Nor do I think can anyone as yet know what to make of the opposition, hence the historical significance I am claiming about it or rather allude to in my “Orpheus.”
Transcendental and/or empiricist?
None of this was formally planned. I just found myself devoted to Novalis and then just as devoted, following this, to Rilke; I got into him from a stray remark about him by a friend that seemed to open up a new world for me, without knowing where I was going with this, and without any thought that I was being plunged into a huge issue until about half way through my writing of the Rilke book …”
JOM
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See, also, from Orpheus Redux, at
https://www.academia.edu/127987357/Orpheus_Redux_a_Literary_Memoir
p.65: “There are issues raised between Rilke and Novalis that will be reserved for a still more advanced stage of inquiry in the future. A close and in-depth study of their lives and work would reveal that Rilke and Novalis do hold the future between them, but who will rise up to meet the challenge represented by the issues they raise? Is Rilke’s seemingly opposite direction from that taken by Novalis (back down into the earth rather than up towards heaven) a step backward in evolutionary terms? Or is it paradoxically a progression, pointing to the need in the future for a higher synthesis of extremes than what Novalis himself conveys, a ‘reculer pour mieux sauter’? In the meantime, anthroposophical-Sophianic culture, as represented in my ‘Riddle’ book [The Riddle of the Sophia], continues on its way alongside, pursuing its own line of investigation into the form any such final synthesis of extremes would take, up and down, forward and back etc., continuing in its own way to engage with the abyss...”
Author’s Note:
“In short, there is a Novalis at one end and a Rilke at the other, mutually challenging, and, in between, the basic Sophiological task of bringing light into the darkness. It would seem that this endeavor takes place across a very wide spectrum of experience brought into sharp perspective by Novalis and Rilke between them…”
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