Rainer Maria Rilke, Poet
There are loads of things I wish I'd discovered when I was younger, like in high school. When exposure to something amazing might have changed the course of my life. Rilke is one of those things.
I was introduced to Rilke's work originally in college, but it wasn't until an ex-girlfriend used some of his poetry with her photographs that that he really blossomed in my mind. I suppose because when I was younger I could only appreciate poetry on a surface or technical level, and too many poems never rang true with me. They were flowery or overwrought or too hard to grasp the imagery.
Rilke has never been like that for me. His writing is like something my own soul occasionally sighs (when it's feeling especially brilliant or tender, I suppose).
I'm sharing Rilke with a friend who'd never heard of him (horrors!), and as I've gone back through his works to select favourite poems to share, I've rediscovered my passion for this poet all over again.
Rilke wrote long prose and poems, and in a collection of 10 letters he exchanged with a young protege, a lovely book was born, Letters to a Young Poet. I include a short selection below, on love. His use of language, of image, of self-reflection ... it's what I love best about his work. My favourite snippet is where he talks of an individual "ripening." What a lovely concept.
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"Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate-?); it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself in another's sake."