The New Life: Dante and Petrarch
(a revision from the Making of a Pure Poet)On concluding his famous correspondence with the young poet, Rilke’s transformation into a pure poet becomes more urgent. He recuperates with Princess Marie at Duino Castle where he was very much at home. It is located in the no-man’s land between the German, Slovenian and Italian borders. At the time it was nominally in Italy, which pleased her highly educated entourage. Their preference was to talk Italian. It proved another providential place for him. Drained after finishing a novel, he starts translating Dante Alighieri’s La Vita Nuova with the help of the Princess and her friends.
Dante was something of a kindred spirit, displaced so often in his life while being an ‘immovably centred’ poet (but not yet famous). Inspired by the troubadours to change from classical Latin to the vernacular, in effect he salvaged poetry from the folios of savants to revive the oral tradition for the general. Poems were how people spoke. Moreover, when written down, they changed the language. And so, people sometimes spoke in quotations. Thus, the vernacular was embellished. Dante was secularised by his less spiritual ‘son’, Petrarch, and modern European poetry as we know it came into being. Not poems as prayers merely but as works of art with renaissance enlightenment.
Dante didn’t jettison completely the feudal conventions of the troubadour. He was faithful to courtly love, but beyond the moral dimension is a humane one hitherto unknown. Rilke was drawn to Dante’s yearning/longing for the unobtainable Beatrice but baulked at a Sehnsucht* that needed the Holy Ghost to requite it. Geschlech** is a matter of elective affinities (‘Is not the secret purpose of this shy earth to urge a pair of lovers to make everything leap within them?’ ‘Duino Elegy 9’). He had broken with the Romantic notion that beauty is truth to find it in Baudelaire’s purgatorial redemptions of the ‘unpleasing’ in Les fleurs du mal. This is scarcely evident in the ‘thing-poems’, but the maudit poet, rather than a virtuous Virgil, acts as Malte’s guide in confronting the hell and heaven of city life. Dante has been superseded. ‘His Paradiso is a helplessly piled blissful mishmash of smiling angelic purity that perplexes, unlike his inferno which is an encyclopaedia of life’ (letter to Karl van de Heydt). He abandons translating his La Vita Nuova to Princess Marie’s regret.
The Princess is Rilke’s ideal hostess. She knows how to leave him alone, sure that he wouldn’t neglect to keep her informed on his current writing and join her when formal occasions call. A note to her after an unproductive spell of work is not untypical of his hermit billet-doux: ‘I rooted around all day in the thicket of my life, screaming to the heavens like a savage, clapping my hands. You wouldn’t believe what hair-raising beasts it startled.’ Such bizarre confidences bring them closer. By all accounts, she not only entertained, but is entertained by her poet, all alone with his art which is going nowhere and everywhere. Her affection is assured.
A year later, on a subsequent stay in Duino Castle, the Princess read him Petrarch. ‘On Mont Ventoux with the sun blazing down on the barren waste I am elsewhere, thinking of my fellow man.’ But it was the Petrarchan prosody that inspired his poetry-to-come rather than the humanism. The Sonnets to Orpheus and to some extent the Duino Elegies had found their form. But still there was the mute question of what vernacular to use. As Dante and Petrarch were ill-at-ease with the strictures of Latin, he felt the same about German as a Bohemian born in Prague. He was inclined to idealise French, but it was too far from being a first language to express his felt thoughts (where ‘going beyond words’ nevertheless needed them). In his later years, though as good as fluent, he was still trying to resolve this problem. His late French poems suggest it was well he stuck to German. According to the American poet Stanley Burnshaw (1906 2005), the struggle to soften the heavy, almost goose-stepping, metre in the language succeeded in giving it a life not seen since Goethe with the Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, ‘opening it up to realms of feeling hitherto unknown and giving it a lyric grace, particularly in the shorter poems’. Large claims I wouldn’t dispute as my knowledge of German poetry down the ages is autodidactic.
But in the first decade of the twentieth century, Rilke’s move into modernist modes was hesitant. For instance, he was loath to accept that verse could be free. Like a tradition fiddler, he was congenitally disposed to tap his foot, and didn’t relax into rubato until the Duino Elegies was out of the way. However, Rilke had already achieved something he set out to do. Five years in advance of his letters to Kappus, his little-known long poem ‘Notes on the Melody of Things’ formulated a plan for the trajectory of future work. Will Stone in translating its forty formal stanzas found it ‘mysterious and enigmatic, tantalizing, and sometimes infuriating in the way it falls back like a wave from the sea wall of clarity’ The metaphor could apply to more than one of Rilke’s poems after The Book of Hours. He was accurately anticipating what became his pride and glory, ‘a clear expression of ambiguity’, something Kafka, his younger Prague contemporary, and subsequently Samuel Beckett, were to do in prose.
The ‘Melody of Things’ makes one thing clear. ‘Work, work, work’ will be the inspiration, and that includes making the reader work. Not necessarily to understand the poem. It won’t have a formula, or a direct line of communication. All they need to do is feel their way to arrive somewhere they have never been to before. It’s as far as you can get from Dante with his well-defined circles of sin and punishment. However, Rilke didn’t give up on Dante’s Inferno. Nearly twenty years on, he transformed the final Duino elegy into an Underworld, not with historical but symbolic figures, like the Lament family, and the wandering poet’s Virgil are the temperamental ‘Order of the Angels’.
Revised from The Making of a Pure Poet in July 6th 2025
Notes
*Sehnsucht: desire ** Geschtech: desire satisfied