mallencunningham -

The writer Rudolf Kassner once said, “The road from intensity to greatness lies through sacrifice.” Rainer Maria Rilke cherished the quote, and even used it as an epigraph to a profound and very self-revealing poem. But it’s Rilke’s life that most clearly illustrates his belief in Kassner's principle.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is widely celebrated as one of the world’s greatest poets. Though he wrote mostly in German, his work has been translated the world over, and its influence continues to resonate deeply with readers and artists everywhere. Figures as diverse as Bob Dylan, Jodie Foster, J.D. Salinger, Woody Allen, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jeff Buckley have expressed passionate respect for Rilke’s writings. In his own day Rilke was hailed by Andre Gide, Paul Valery, Romain Rolland, Rudolf Kassner, Stefan Zweig, and other European luminaries.

Rilke’s works include The Duino Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus, New Poems, The Book of Images, The Book of Hours, and a single magnificent novel entitled The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (published 1910). He is perhaps best known in the United States for his Letters to a Young Poet.

Born in Prague to middle-class parents who had a lost a daughter prior to his birth, Rilke was raised as a girl for his first six years. At age ten he was sent to a military academy in southern Austria. The half-decade spent at the academy was an experience of unmitigated horror for the coddled young Rilke, and would haunt him for the rest of his days.

Rilke spent most of his adult life wandering restlessly through the countries of western Europe. He enjoyed friendships with a number of Europe’s most influential personalities, including the French sculptor Auguste Rodin and the brilliant Lou Andreas-Salomé, a charismatic woman of letters who was rumored to have broken Nietzsche’s heart, and who would later become a protege of Sigmund Freud. While living in obscurity and penury in Munich at age 21, Rilke became Lou’s sudden lover. She was married, famous, and 14 years his senior. The affair began an artistic friendship that would last through three decades, and would profoundly influence both the poet and Lou.

From an early age until his death in Switzerland from Leukemia in 1926, Rilke displayed a fierce and wholehearted commitment to his work as a poet. His entire adult life was characterized by a relentless pursuit of art and the conditions propitious to making it. Indeed, his need to live and breathe art rendered his loyalties to family and friends extremely complex, and kept him perpetually unprotected, homeless, and poor. It gave him, however, his best poetic works—not a few of which are held to be among the greatest in the world today.

Rilke’s writings, in their pungent synthesis of mystery, terror, and praise, ring with powerful interiority and speak to the immense sensitivity of their creator—a man who experienced the world’s pain and beauty in the absence of any self-protective membrane or filter, a man for whom every sensory impression became an unstoppable vibration of the soul.

The life behind this unparalleled work tells its own strange and inspiring story of long sacrifice and sudden moments of transcendence. Lost Son depicts Rilke in the drive of his all-consuming art as it carries him back and forth across Western Europe over the course of 25 intensely restless years.

Lost Son is the culmination of six years of research, travel, and writing—and is in many ways the result of a long conversation with a master, a ghost. A reply, perhaps, to Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, which I first read at 14 and felt to be written to me across the span of a century. The poet’s figure continues to haunt me. In half a lifetime of reading Rilke, the power of his magnificent writing has only deepened, and it will no doubt affect me for years to come.

For more about Rilke, please visit my author blog which features regular content relating to the famous poet and my research for Lost Son. —M. Allen Cunningham