The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Rainer Maria Rilke (Author), Ulrich Baer (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 22, 2005

“You have to live life to the limit, not according to each day but by plumbing its depth.”
–RAINER MARIA RILKE

In this treasury of uncommon wisdom and spiritual insight, the best writings and personal philosophies of one of the twentieth century’s greatest poets, Rainer Maria Rilke, are gleaned by Ulrich Baer from thousands of pages of never-before translated correspondence.

The result is a profound vision of how the human drive to create and understand can guide us in every facet of life. Arranged by theme–from everyday existence with others to the exhilarations of love and the experience of loss, from dealing with adversity to the nature of inspiration, here are Rilke’s thoughts on how to live life in a meaningful way:

Life and Living: “How good life is. How fair, how incorruptible, how impossible to deceive: not even by strength, not even by willpower, and not even by courage. How everything remains what it is and has only this choice: to come true, or to exaggerate and push too far.”

Art: “The work of art is adjustment, balance, reassurance. It can be neither gloomy nor full of rosy hopes, for its essence consists of justice.”

Faith: “I personally feel a greater affinity to all those religions in which the middleman is less essential or almost entirely suppressed.”

Love: “To be loved means to be ablaze. To love is: to shine with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away; to love is to last.”

Intimate, stylistically masterful, brilliantly translated, and brimming with the wonder and passion of Rilke, The Poet’s Guide to Life is comparable to the best works of wisdom in all of literature and a perfect book for all occasions.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

One of the best-known twentieth-century poets, Rilke is many things to many people: poet of solitude; poet of the misunderstood; above all, patron saint of adolescent angst. As early as the 1920s, critics ravaged his poetry as being read primarily by young girls and old maids. His work endured, however, to be embraced by contemporary pop culture, so that his words are recited in movies, at weddings, and during graduation ceremonies. Editor-translator Baer suggests treating this selection of Rilke as a user's manual for life, especially when something meaningful needs to be said. The book is arranged thematically, and those themes are numerous, ranging from work and art to faith and goodness to love and death. Besides familiar lines, Baer presents excerpts from Rilke's approximately 7,000 letters, translated for the first time into English from their original German and French. For anyone who admires Rilke and the timeless profundity of his messages, and for those who seek an introduction to his worldview, this is an indispensable resource. June Sawyers
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

Advance praise for The Poet’s Guide to Life

“Most Western wisdom writers exalt renunciation rather than desire. Rilke is almost Asian in his differences from Goethe, Nietzsche, Freud. For him, eros is not the wisdom of fools and the folly of the wise. Nor does he, like Plato’s Socrates, climb the ladder of love toward the Good. Ulrich Baer uniquely makes available Rilke’s bittersweet apprehensions of the objective realities-of-desire, and of the consequent, triumphantly knowing poetics-of-loss.”
–Harold Bloom, author of Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? and The Western Canon

“Rilke longed to be a worker, and in one autobiographical poem he described his face as that of someone who serves. Like Dante he believed that love is the animating force in the universe–though Rilke’s quest took him, not toward the stars, but back to the earth, to the unnoticed miracle of things precisely as they are. Professor Baer’s book is the best of its kind I have ever encountered. It is clearly and elegantly translated and arranged, an inspired gift to a world in terrible need of Rilke’s grave and joyful vision.”
–Franz Wright, author of Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry

“This thematic selection from the vast trove of Rilke’s letters and papers reveals an unfamiliar side of the poet that broadens and deepens the range of his thought. Professor Baer’s translations are eloquent, and his splendid Introduction is sensitive, thorough, and illuminating.”
–Burton Pike, professor emeritus of comparative literature at City University of New York, and award-winning translator

“Boy, Rilke is a kook. Reading The Poet’s Guide to Life, I have to say that I love his point of view.”
–Gus Van Sant, director of Good Will Hunting, My Own Private Idaho, and many other films

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Modern Library (March 22, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679642927
• ISBN-13: 978-0679642923
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 0.8 x 7.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #256,619 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "It is possible to love to such an extent that the shortcomings of one's beloved begin to appear touching , even wonderful, ..., June 28, 2006

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke (Hardcover)

This is a profound and beautiful book. Ulrich Baer, editor and translator of the volume has gone through the more than seven- thousand letters Rilke wrote in his lifetime and selected those he felt had the most to say about living and loving in the world. He orders the letters into sections which begin with his title and are followed by a line from Rilke.

1) On LIfe and Living You have to live life to the limit
2) On Being with others To be a Part, that is Fulfillment for us
3)On Work: Get up Cheerfully on Days You have to Work
4) On Difficulty and Adversity The Measure by which we may know our Strength
5)On Childhood and Education; This Joy in Daily Discovery
6) On Nature It Knows Nothing of Us
7)On Solitude The Lonest People Above all Contribute Most to Commonality
8)On Illness and Recovery Pain Tolerates No Interpretation
9)On Loss, Dying and Death Even Time Does not 'Console' It puts things in Place and creates Order
10) On Language That Vast, Humming and Swinging Syntax
11)On Art Art Presents Itself as a Way of Life
12) On Faith A Direction of the Heart
13) On Goodness and Morality Nothing Good, Once it Has Come into Existence May be Suppressed
14) On Love There is no Force in the World but Love

In his rich repetitive introduction to the volume Baer discusses the special place letter-writing had in Rilke's life and work. Rilke in his letters has a spontaneity and poetic freedom beyond that in his very disciplined and exacting poems. But of course the themes of both forms of writing are common ones, and the letters a source of ideas and inspirations for the Poetry. What distinguishes the Letters from another form Rilke used to great advantage ' the Diary' is the consciousness of the 'you' at the other end.
Baer suggests one particular strength of Rilke's writing in the Letters is his nuanced awareness of the person at the other end, and his ability to reach out and feel and know how to express a message which will resonate in the heart of the recipient.
Baer gives a picture of Rilke the legendary Poet- waiting for the fruit to ripen ,as most notably in the great period in which he suddenly in weeks time wrote the 'Duino Elegies' and 'Sonnets to Orpheus'- in contrast to the daily workman letter-writing Rilke. Baer underlines that Rilke expresses in the letters his own rare and special vision of life, one which conjoins the everyday with the cosmic, which feels in the rhythms of rhyme our inner rhythm of biology and mind, which senses in its internalization of the worlds objects a fullness of being and lived life. Baer presents the picture of a poet of holy immanence whose idea of the aesthetic is not in the pretty only, but who forges and finds beauty in the ugly aspects of reality also.
Baer also tells the not always admirable tale of Rilke's personal life, the marriage to Clara Westhoff, the birth of their sole daughter Ruth, Rilke's abandonment of them, his seeking out his own fate but not without his fawning at aristocratic patrons, his love of love but often cruel abandonment of those loved, his loyalty to his own faith and vocation as poet, his apprentice- admiring relationship with Rodin and wisdom in being free of it, his great fame. And what is in a way most touching his keeping in touch through the letters as he deepened into a solitude which for him was far more blessing than curse.
It seems there now is a fashion started perhaps by Alain de Botton with his volume on Proust, of selecting out from the total work of great literary creators passages best encapsulating their wisdom and vision of life.
Many of the statements of this volume may seem exaggerated and in need of qualification. Yet even these statements are richly poetically suggestive. The work of a great poet for whom ripeness is within, and richness in feeling infuses all.

" The strings of sorrow may only be used extensively if one vows to play on them also at a later point and in their particular key all of the joyousness that accumulates behind everything that is difficult, painful and that we had to suffer, and without which the voices are not complete."

"I believe that one is never more just than at those moments when one admires unreservedly and with absolute devotion. It is in this spirit of unchecked admiration that the few great individuals whom our time was unable to stifle ought to be presented, precisely because ourage has become so very good at assuming a critical stance."

"After all, life is not even close to being as logically consistent as our worries; it has many more unexpected ideas and faces than we do."

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Transformative, April 14, 2011

By 

Dr. Paul Gilbert (Mill Valley, Ca USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke (Hardcover)

How did I live this long without the wisdom of Rilke? Recommended to me by a poet, this unusual volume is really two books in one. Ulrich's Baer's extensive introduction itself is a work of great subtlety and wisdom. He presents Rilke as a complex figure whose romantic image is at variance with his deep commitment to mindfulness and rigorous self-examination. Then there is Rilke himself relentlessly holding us to the originality and delicious upredictability of our fate. Every writer should have this volume in their personal library.
Paul Gilbert, Jr.