The Poet's Guide to Life
The Wisdom of Rilke
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- 11,99 €
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- 11,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
“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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
While Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet has served as inspiration for generations of artists, it presents only his best-known letters. As Baer, acting chair of NYU's German department, asserts in his introduction, Rilke was a prolific letter writer, corresponding with hundreds of people. Baer's goal in this unsuccessful collection is to convey Rilke's wisdom on many aspects of existence. Rilke had much to say about the process of living, and Baer is right to find inspiration in his thoughts, but this volume displays too much of the editor's hand. By presenting Rilke's thoughts on subjects ranging from grief to language to love as short, aphoristic capsules (some passages are no longer than a line), Baer takes them out of the context in which they were written. Letters, even from a sage to a supplicant, are part of a dialogue. It's not just chronology that is lost here the reader cannot trace Rilke's own developing ideas but what seems to have been of utmost importance to the writer himself: his participation in two-way relationships. (On sale Mar. 22)