People At Night
Rainer Maria Rilke
Now more famous for his writing about poetry than for his poems themselves, Rilke’s verses were revolutionary in his lifetime. Born to a German-speaking family in Prague in 1875, Rilke never felt at home in the cultures that surrounded him, rigorously defined by morality and religion as they were. Instead, he sought his inspiration elsewhere and found it, ultimately, upon his travels to Russia. It was there he developed a philosophy of existential materialism and art as religion. He would write with Christian imagery and make references to God, but for him God was a life force accessible only through art, not the recognisable Judeo-Christian God of the time. Religion, he said, was the art of the uncreative. But his heresy was well disguised by the lyricism of his work and as he progressed, Rilke’s writing shifted towards idea of the purpose of life and the poets role in society. In his non-fiction masterpiece ‘Letters to a Young Poet’, Rilke shared a worldview he developed over many years. One that understood pain as essential to life, and valued the true and simple things that could be accessed only through reflection and creation. “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses”, he said, “who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”