The above photograph is of the ramparts of Castle Duino, on the Adriatic Coast about fifteen miles west of Trieste, where Rainer Maria Rilke was inspired in 1912 to write the first and second of his ten Duino Elegies, the cycle of extraordinary poems which are his masterpiece.

By then he had already been publishing poetry for fifteen years. Born in Prague in 1875, Rainer Maria Rilke was brought up as a girl called Sophie until he was 5 and as a practising Roman Catholic. From 11 to 16 he was sent to a Military Academy far from home. Yet by 1896, aged 21, the already footloose Rilke (he would lead a nomadic existence all his life), fresh from aborted attempts to study at a School of Commerce in Linz and read philosophy at the University in Prague, had decided to write and moved again, this time to Munich, to do so.

Within the next few years Rilke produced an autobiographical novel, four increasingly major collections of poetry and a rhythmic prose narrative. So, he would, by the age of 27, have had easily enough poetic and literary credentials to be invited to tutor aspiring poets at somewhere like the Arvon Foundation ! This was actually something he was clearly vocated for: you need read only a page from some of the most famous, insightful and revealing letters ever sent by a poet to an aspiring one, Letters to A Young Poet, between 1903 and 1908.

By then he had been developing, in his first collection, The Book of Pictures (or Images), what has since been described as his ‘strong new style’ of poetry. So what was it about his old style that needed changing?

Rilke 100 will answer that. We will then explore his next collection, The Book of Hours, romantic poems he called ‘prayers’, to a God who had nothing to do with either Creation or Christianity. “I began with Things, which were the true confidants of my lonely childhood, and it was already a great achievement that, without any outside help, I managed to get as far as animals”, he wrote. *

And then came his third book of poems, Crowned With Dreams, the first to promise real poetic potency and reveal his common cause with music, which he called “the untrammelled superabundance of God”.

Rilke 100 will look at Rilke’s transformative relationships with the sculptor Rodin and the painter Paula Modersohn Becker, the precise new visual style of his New Poems (1907-1908), his later more ambitious poems like ‘Requiem For A Friend’ (1909), and the startlingly beautiful achievement of his Duino Elegies (1912 to 1923). 

These sessions are always focussed and informal. Everyone can feel free to express their thoughts and feelings about the poems as they want to. A lot of ground gets covered, poems and readers come alive, and friends are quickly made of the poets and each other. 

*Whenever Rilke writes about God, . . .  he is not referring to the deity in the traditional sense, but rather uses the term to refer to the life force, or nature, or an all-embodying, pantheistic consciousness that is only slowly coming to realize its existence. (Poetry Foundation).

HANDOUT COPY FOR THE SESSION WILL BE SENT TO YOU IN ADVANCE TO PRINT AT HOME