Life of a poet

by Ralph Freedman

Life of a Poet is devoted to the careful reenactment of the difficult relationship between Rilke's life and his art. In this outstanding biography, Ralph Freedman traces Rilke's extraordinary career by combining detailed accounts of salient episodes from the poet's restless life with an intimate reading of the verse and prose that refract them. A master of the word, Rilke sought to capture and emulate the colors and forms of painters like Cezanne and sculptors like Rodin. A brilliant poet in German, he also wrote in Russian and Italian, and late in life even sought recognition as a poet in French. These contrary impulses left their mark on Rilke's verse and lent it a unique resonance, which Life of a Poet conveys as a biography and as a work of criticism. . In this portrait of the artist par excellence, Freedman reveals how Rilke lived out the very process of the poetic imagination by transforming the self that he did so much to project. His poetry transformed his intimate self, not on