And by reading the letters we feel that we are getting to the essence not only of Rilke's poetry, but of poetry itself, or of a kind of poetry. They are the best way for the non-German speaker to get a hold of Rilke – the poetry is notoriously hard to translate. James refers, with withering sarcasm, to "admirers of Rilke's spiritual refinement".Īnd yet there are the poems, and these letters. Clive James said his "bread and butter" letters were "nauseating", and in his Cultural Amnesia justly skewers him for using veiled antisemitism to scupper Karl Kraus's chances with one of the women Rilke himself loved. Here is a string of damning adjectives from the TLS a couple of years ago: "vain, self-pitying, obsessive, narcissistic, snobbish, whining, arrogant, childish, demanding, lachrymose and neurotic, as well as being given to tantrums and panics". Here is Michael Wood: "Unspeakably phoney in everything except his writing, snobbish, evasive, preachy and calculating as only the unworldly are". F irst, let us admit that there is a Rilke problem: Rilke.
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