TYPAPHOBE

Ian Ellison: What is it about Rainer Maria Rilke? The influence of the Bohemian Austrian poet on modern culture reads like a who’s who of the great and the good. W. H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Edith Sitwell claimed to be directly inspired by him. The first English translations of his work, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, became classics in their own right. 

He has been set to music (both classical and rock) and proven himself a Hollywood touchstone, most recently providing the concluding epigraph of Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit. Oprah Winfrey has quoted him on television and Lady Gaga has lines from his Letters to a Young Poet (1929) tattooed on her arm.

Maybe he has had such an impact because he is first and foremost a poet of the heart. He expresses those emotions we seldom desire—melancholy, longing, and loneliness above all—with such artistry and feeling that it can seem almost joyful. At the more esoteric end of things, he is regularly co-opted by New Age self-help gurus who take the closing line of his “Archaic Torso of Apollo”—“You must change your life”—as their mantra. Faced with the immensity of his work and its afterlives, you might feel like you know enough about Rilke, but the man himself has for a long time remained something of an enigma. Yet this may well be about to change.

It is rare for a poet to make headlines almost a hundred years after their death, especially for good reasons. But in early December 2022, Rilke was suddenly front-page news across Germany. In what was widely described as the purchase of the century by the German media, the Deutsches Literaturarchiv (DLA) announced it had acquired a collection of Rilke’s manuscripts comprising some 10,000 handwritten pages. These included draft poems and notes for their composition, as well as 2,500 letters written by the poet himself and a further 6,300 addressed to him. One of the most significant literary estates in postwar history, its cultural value is priceless, and it will soon be made available to the general public. A major exhibition at the Literaturmuseum der Moderne (the DLA’s next-door neighbor in Marbach) is planned for 2025 to mark the 150th anniversary of Rilke’s birth, and plans are afoot to digitize the entire collection. After being cataloged, the collection will be made available online without restriction, opening up this treasure trove to academic researchers across the globe, as well as general readers.