Last Year's Lesson: Rainer Maria Rilke Born - Dec. 4, 1875

Rainer Maria Rilke was born on this day in 1875.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, history fans, if you want a double dose of history,
here's a rerun for today, brought to you by Tracy V. Wilson.
Welcome to this Day in History Class from how Stuff
Works dot Com and from the desk of Stuff you
Missed in History Class. It's the show where we explore
the past one day at a time with a quick
look at what happened today in history. Hello, and welcome

(00:24):
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and it's December four.
Ryiner Maria Rilka was born on this day in eighteen
seventy five. He was a poet, a novelist, and essayist.
He primarily wrote in German and in French, but his
work has been translated into numerous other languages, and he's
become particularly studied and beloved in the English speaking world

(00:47):
in a way that's not really all that common among
non English language poets. He was his parents only surviving child,
and for a lot of his early life his mother
actually dressed him in skirts. She was trying to recover
from the death of his older sister, who had died
as a baby. His first formal education was at a
military school, although it wasn't a particularly good fit for him.

(01:11):
It wasn't just because of his temperament, which was not
well suited to being at a military school. It was
also because of his health. He had a series of
chronic illnesses that affected him throughout his life. Health problems
led to his being discharged from the second military school
that he attended. He went on to study philosophy and art,
and he wasn't a particularly good student. He moved from

(01:35):
one university to another, not being all that engaged with
the work that he was doing. And he also started
writing when he was still a young man. His early work, though,
was really derivative of the writing of other poets, to
the point that some critics today don't really describe it
as derivative. They describe it as plagiarized. But he started

(01:58):
to reinvent himself when he was two. Part of this
was through a relationship with lou Andreas Salome, who was
a writer who was connected to numerous other writers. She
had a whole reputation for being a just astonishing woman.
She was also married, but the relationship inspired him to
basically remake his whole life. At the age of twenty five,

(02:21):
he married a sculptor named Clara Westof and they had
a child together. Although they didn't live together for very long,
a lot of their marriage took place through letters, and
he would later go on to describe marriage as two
people protecting one another's solitude. For a lot of his life,
including during and before his marriage, he just moved continually.

(02:43):
At one point he lived in twenty five different places
over the span of five years. He learned numerous languages.
He pursued passionate relationships with women in all of these places.
Later on, he started writing poems about philosophy and God
and beauty, using imagery to express his ideas. His writings

(03:04):
on God, though we should be clear, they're not so
much about religion or a divine figure. They're more about
God as a universal consciousness, or as a life force,
or as a natural presence, not so much as a
divine being. He also had friendships and working relationships with
so many other philosophers and writers and poets. One of

(03:28):
them was Auguste Rodin, who was a major influence on
his work. He also worked as Rodance secretary for a time,
but was let go after Ordan alleged that Rilco was
answering his letters without his permission. Bilka died of leukemia
on December twenty nine, and there's a story that he

(03:50):
pricked his finger on a rose and that when he
did that, this led to an infection that hastened his death.
It's not totally clear whether that is a reel of
or apocryphal. After his death, though, he became hugely influential
to poets and multiple languages, with some of them naming
him as the greatest poet of his age when it

(04:12):
comes to English language readers, though only a few of
his poems were really available in very good English language
translations until the nineteen seventies. Instead, a lot of the
admiration for him comes from his prose, in particular the
Letters to a Young Poet, which was a response to
the aforesaid young poets request for advice because we're just

(04:35):
about writing, though there were also really about life. Roca's
reputation is one of being just a profoundly thoughtful and conscientious,
introspective person, someone who really crafted himself into the person
that he wanted to be and in the process transformed
himself into a remarkable poet. Although he definitely has detractors,

(04:57):
people who instead read him as a pretentious woman eyes
are rather than a more intuitive and passionate soul. Thanks
very much to Eve's Jeff Cope for her research work
on today's show, and thanks to Casey Pigram and Chandler
Maze for their audio work. You can subscribe to the
Stay in History Class on Apple podcast, Google podcast, the
I Heart Radio app, and wherever else you get your podcasts,

(05:18):
and you can tune in tomorrow for a mystery at
sea that still persists till today.