Abstract
At the exact mid-point of this remarkable book Charlie Louth analyses the poem ‘Der Geist Ariel’ written in 1912. Composed in memory of a reading of The Tempest, this lesser-known poem, ‘one of Rilke’s most difficult and fascinating’ (p. 281), typifies much about Rilke and about what Louth brings out about his work. There is Rainer Maria Rilke – a person of flesh and blood, though it is easy to forget this – and there is his extraordinary linguistic gift, a magical amplification of the gift most of us of have of verbalizing the world and ourselves. With characteristically controlled indeterminacy, the poem develops the relationship between Prospero and Ariel into a meditation upon that between the flesh-and-blood person (just an ordinary duke) and its negotiations with the whole wide world. The heavy body and the weightless spirit exhibit an impenetrable interdependence. The magical aspect of this is to communicate to a reader, in whom words become flesh, how coming and going or holding captive and letting go can co-exist, or at least not mutually exclude one another. Louth’s subtitle is ‘The Life of the Work’, and it is this elusive life that he pursues across the entire vast range of Rilke’s lyrical output (with Malte as an honorary poem in prose), including not only so many neglected poems from periods before, between or after the familiar great ones, but poems in other languages and translations. What emerges is Rilke’s struggle to contain his verbal brilliance without killing it off, a systole and diastole dedicated to keeping body and soul together.
The study is organized chronologically, yet most thoughtfully constructed, with an opening chapter on the image of entrances and thresholds (‘Rilke’s Openings’) and a concluding one on hands, not only their insides (as in the famous poem ‘Handinneres’) but their role in greetings, so that we begin by entering the poems and end with how they need to be shared to live. One of the great virtues of Louth’s critical intelligence is tact. The last poem before the Epilogue on hands (also the last poem to be printed in Rilke’s lifetime) is the only one in the 500 or so pages to be left without commentary or analysis. It is given because, although the work and not the life is at issue, it is ‘poignant’ to recall when we read the poem ‘Vollmacht’ how ill Rilke was, a few months before his death, when he wrote it.
Otherwise all the periods and phases of Rilke’s productive life are characterized, predominantly by the close reading of representative poems. These readings are very fine, combining patient attention with the aforementioned tact, a light touch that allows the poetry to breathe. It goes without saying that these readings give as much attention to the highly wrought but also, over his life, highly various forms of Rilke’s poetry. In the matter of the theological tendency of some Rilke criticism (and indeed, to be honest, Rilke himself), Louth is again tactful: ‘The aim must be to take the writing seriously on the understanding that its form has the potential to affect the reader, to in some way alter their life, without a clear instruction having been handed over or received’ (p. xvi). The patience with which Louth covers the whole career is rewarding for those who love Rilke but have not read the entire oeuvre. Not only do you discover new poems, but the continuities and discontinuities of the work, the systole and diastole mentioned above, emerge in clearer distinction. It is characteristic that the study does not put forward a particular attention-getting new reading of Rilke, just an extremely good and complete one, with courteous corrections to critics here and there or multiple modest but telling adjustments to received wisdom (the word ‘Weltinnenraum’ appears only once in the whole of Rilke!). Louth’s whole feeling for the poet, the affirmation of immanence, the communication of the life of form, the sense that real poetry and life flow into one another, dictate that he should see in Die Sonette an Orpheus the poetic pinnacle, but he treats every phase, and each poem considered, with equal respect. His attentiveness and respect are also reflected in his translations – everything is given in English as well as German – which make it possible for the interested reader or writer who has no German to follow. Given the enormous challenges involved, this is a quietly major achievement.
This book has many outstanding merits and virtues, some of which I have listed. But its greatest merit is that it exists. Only a miracle of dedication on the part of its author could have produced it. It is a defence of reading: ‘to read at all is to pause, is to take your time in times where an anxious haste pervades much of what we do’ (p. 20). Anybody who cares about the stewardship and transmission of civilized culture has to be grateful to Charlie Louth, and also to those funders who supported his work, which must have taken many more years to complete than any research assessment exercise could countenance, and not least to the collegiate university where it appears the humanities are still valued enough to make such things possible. Perhaps it is not an accident that another recent brilliant Oxford-based study of literature, Emma Smith’s This is Shakespeare, though a very different sort of book, is also dedicated to letting writing breathe.