Rilke: The Last Inward Man

The Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) is the guardian of subjective individual consciousness besieged by modernity according to this vaporous appreciation. Novelist and critic Chamberlain (Nietzche in Turin) situates Rilke amid upheavals of the early 20th century, with its loss of faith, Darwinian rejection of an orderly Creation, and urban anomie (Rilke’s first stint in Paris was one of poverty and alienation). In reaction to modern disenchantments, she somewhat murkily contends, Rilke’s poetry transferred religious piety to a rapt focus on material existence, sex, art, and nature; he thus forged for himself a modern, secular, yet re-enchanted poetic outlook. Chamberlain elaborates her arguments through extensive analyses of Rilke’s poems, working mainly from her own translations, and explores the influences exerted on him by such figures as his lover Lou Andreas-Salomé, a psychoanalyst who convinced him to change his name from René to the “unambiguously male” Rainer. Chamberlain’s commentary on Rilke’s poetry can be shrewd and colorful, but her framing concept of inwardness is so evasive (“it’s an invitation at once to expand inwardly by way of imagination... to enlarge on a world outside us”) as to leave her larger analysis oblique (“It was as if the spiritual absences he felt could be refined into near-presences”). This one will largely leave readers scratching their heads.[em] (Aug.) [/em]