Rilke and His French Contemporaries

Abstract

T IS NO longer necessary to stress the fact that France was the capital influence on Rilke's artistic evolution. More than Goethe, Heine, Schopenhauer, and even Nietzsche, Rilke saw in French culture die hohere Art, the higher kind. His admiration for the language with its rigorous and elegant precision, for the writers who handle this tool with an ever-controlled mastery, his love for the country and especially l'irremplaqable, l'inepuisable Paris-all this we find expressed again and again in his voluminous correspondence. It is less well known, however, that Rilke was possessed in his last years by an insatiable avidite livresque, almost exclusively directed towards French literature. Throughout most of his life he had not been a passionate reader; even in his apprentice years in Paris, before the war, he limited his reading mainly to Maeterlinck, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Jamres, Maurice de Guerin, Anna de Noailles, and his personal friends, Verhaeren, Gide, and Vildrac. With the exception of a few months of military service in Austria, Rilke spent the war years in Germany, mostly at Munich. In these years he spoke consistently of a spiritual drought, comparing himself to a clock whose movement had stopped. This creative sterility (which he undoubtedly exaggerated) he attributed in great measure to his remoteness from France.