2 options
The poet's guide to life : the wisdom of Rilke / edited and translated by Ulrich Baer.
Van Pelt Library PT2635.I65 Z48 2005
Available
LIBRA - Special PT2635.I65 Z48 2005
Available in person
Request an item
Access options
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Rilke, Rainer Maria, 1875-1926.
- Standardized Title:
- Correspondence. Selections. English
- Language:
- English
- French
- German
- Subjects (All):
- Rilke, Rainer Maria, 1875-1926. Correspondence.
- Rilke, Rainer Maria.
- Rilke, Rainer Maria, 1875-1926--Translations into English.
- Rilke, Rainer Maria, 1875-1926.
- Authors, German--20th century--Correspondence.
- Authors, German.
- Genre:
- Correspondence.
- Personal correspondence.
- Penn Provenance:
- Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)
- Physical Description:
- lii, 215 pages ; 20 cm
- Place of Publication:
- New York : Modern Library, 2005.
- Summary:
- 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, 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.
- Contents:
- On life and living: you have to live life to the limit
- On being with others: to be a part, that is fulfillment for us
- On work: get up cheerfully on days you have to work
- On difficulty and adversity: the measure by which we may know our strength
- On childhood and education: this joy in daily discovery
- On nature: it knows nothing of us
- On solitude: the loneliest people above all contribute most to commonality
- On illness and recovery: pain tolerates no interpretation
- On loss, dying, and death: even time does not "console"... it puts things in the place and creates order
- On language: that vast, humming, and swinging syntax
- On art: art presents itself as a way of life
- On faith: a direction of the heart
- On goodness and morality: nothing good, once it has come into existence, may be suppressed
- On love: there is no force in the world but love.
- Notes:
- Excerpts in English translation from approximately 7,000 of Rilke's German and French letters.
- "Sources": pages [203]-215.
- ISBN:
- 0679642927
- OCLC:
- 56103850
The Penn Libraries is committed to describing library materials using current, accurate, and responsible language. If you discover outdated or inaccurate language, please fill out this feedback form to report it and suggest alternative language.