裏爾克：一個害怕被遺忘的詩人

如果你的内心未曾感到过损伤，
那是因为——你从来没有被爱过。

。

Notes on Rilke's poems.
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 -1926).


1. Our life passes in transformation.

“Until the end, the poet knew that real life finally exists only within., waiting to become something other than itself. As he said in his Seventh Elegy: 
    Nowhere, Beloved, will world be but within us. 
    Our life passes in transformation. 
    And the external wanes ever smaller.”

                  -- by Ralph Freedman.

Ralph Freedman. LIFE OF A POET: Rainer Maria Rilke.
Lyrical Verse Translated from the German by Helen Sword In Collaboration with the Author. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 640 pp. Go to the First Chapter of Life of a Poet. Source: www.washingtonpost.com.

2. To Work Is to Live Without Dying.

Rilke was one of the most gifted and conscientious artists who ever lived--his motto was "To work is to live without dying." His poetry, fiction, and prose embody a search for a way to be good without God, for transcendence in a hyper-rationalized world where even death--Rilke hated hospitals and the way dying had been stripped of its terrible intimacy--was dead. And beyond all that, he was fascinating.

What women found irresistible about Rilke was not the effect he had on them but the effect they had on him…
                  -- by Lee Siegel.  

Lee Siegel. The Atlantic Monthly; April 1996; "To Work Is to Live Without Dying"; Volume 277, No. 4; pages 112-118. Copyright © 1996 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.


3. Who speaks of victory?, Enduring is everything.

Perhaps Rilke can be forgiven his human failures after all. Or . . . perhaps not. I still wish he'd been nicer to people, so that one could admire the man, as one does so many of his poems: unreservedly. "Who speaks of victory?," he once wrote pragmatically. "Enduring is everything."
                  -- by Michael Dirda.

Michael Dirda. Devil or Angel. Washington Post Staff Writer. Sunday, March 31, 1996. Source: www.washingtonpost.com.

4. "The greatest German poet since Hölderlin."

Assets & Liabilities of Genius. RAINER MARIA RILKE — E. M. Butler —Macmillan. Monday, Jul. 28, 1941. Source: TIME.

Rainer Maria Rilke could serve as a symbol of the best and worst meanings of the word genius. He was a lap dog for cultivated ladies, loveless as a serpent, soaked to the soul in the most indecent self-pity. He was also ruthlessly loyal to the fact of his genius as a poet. Professor Butler looks at him with a level, sane, exacting eye. The result is the first biography and critique of Rilke to be worthy of its subtle, over-culted subject, "the greatest German poet since Hölderlin."* [* Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843): Whom critics refer to as the German Keats.]