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Rainer Maria Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties

Strong poetry and prose

Rainer Maria Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties is an anthology of Rainer Maria Rilke's strongest poetry and prose for both aficionados and new readers. Here is a mini-anthology of poetry and prose for both aficionados and those readers discovering Rainer Maria Rilke for the first time. John J. L. Mood has assembled a collection of Rilke's strongest work, presenting commentary along with the selections.
Mood links into an essay passages from letters that show Rainer Maria Rilke's profound understanding of men and women and his ardent spirituality, rooted in the senses. Combining passion and sensitivity, the poems on love presented here are often not only sensual but sexual as well. Others pursue perennial themes in his work, death and life, growth and transformation.
Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties concludes with Rainer Maria Rilke's reflections on wisdom and openness to experience, on grasping what is most difficult and turning what is most alien into that which we can most trust.
Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties
ISBN: 0393310981

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

Rainer Maria Rilke is generally considered the German language's greatest poet of the 20th century. Though he never found a consistent verse form, his haunting images tend to focus on the problems of Christianity in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety. Rainer Maria Rilke is generally placed in the camp of Modernist poets, though his religious dilemmas may set him apart from some of his peers.
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in both verse and in a highly lyrical prose. His two most famous verse pieces are the Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies; his two most famous prose pieces are the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
In 1897 in Munich Rainer Maria Rilke met and fell in love with the widely traveled intellectual and lady of letters Lou Andreas-Salome (1861-1937). The ensuing intensive relationship with the married woman lasted until 1899. But even after their separation Lou Andreas-Salomé continued to be Rainer Maria Rilke's most important confidant until the end of his life. Because she had trained from 1912 to 1913 as a psychoanalyst with Sigmund Freud she was able to impart knowledge of psychoanalysis to Rainer Maria Rilke. In autumn 1900 Rilke stayed in Worpswede where he got to know the sculptress Clara Westhoff (1878-1954), whom he married in the following spring.
The most important works of the Paris period were Neuen Gedichte (New Poems) (1907), Der neuen Gedichte anderer Teil (Another Part of the New Poems) (1908), the two Requiem poems (1909) and the novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, started in 1904 and completed in January 1910.
In an intensive creative period Rilke completed the Duinese Elegies within several weeks in February 1922. Before and after he wrote both parts of the poem cycle The Sonnets to Orpheus. Both are among the highpoints of Rilke's work.
Only shortly before his death was Rilke's illness diagnosed as leukaemia. Rainer Maria Rilke died on 29 December 1926 in the Val-Mont Sanatorium.