Rilke’s Poetics of Becoming

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 LEGENDA
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 EDITORIAL BOARD
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 Rilke’s Poetics of Becoming

Ben Hutchinson

Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge

2006

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 First published 2006

Published by the
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 CONTENTS
❖

Acknowledgements viii
Abbreviations ix
Introduction: ‘Werden’ and its Variants 1
PART I 9
1 The Contemporary Climate 10
2 Juvenilia: 1893–1899 35
3 ‘Der werdende Gott’: Das Stunden-Buch and its Roots 60
4 ‘Dingwerdung’: Theoretical Transitions 92
5 Neue Gedichte: ‘Linear’ vs. ‘Circular’ Process 118
PART II 145
6 ‘Immer noch Entfalten um Entfalten’: A Poetics of Deferral 146
7 ‘Übergang’: Beginnings and Ends 171
Conclusions 193
Bibliography 199
Index 207

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
❖

This book owes many debts, both financial and moral. It would not have been
possible without the generous support of the Arts and Humanities Research Board
over a period of three years, nor that of the University of Oxford, which funded a
research trip to Vienna with a Scatcherd European scholarship. More importantly,
perhaps, the influence of successive supervisors, examinors and friends has been
decisive, and thus I am happy to express my gratitude to David Constantine, Karen
Leeder, Charlie Louth, Leonard Olschner, Ray Ockenden, Jim Reed, and Ritchie
Robertson. My biggest debt, however, is to Tony Phelan, who guided this project
through to completion with calm assurance.
The debt owed to parents, friends and fiancée is of a different order, profound and
inexpressible.
Parts of chapters three, five and the conclusion have already been published in
different form in Focus on German Studies (2004) and German Life & Letters (January
2005), to whom I would also like to express my gratitude.
This book is dedicated to my grandfather Frederick Yorke, and to what might have
been if he had stayed at Oxford in 1939.

Ben Hutchinson
Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach, December 2005

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 ABBREVIATIONS
❖

Rilke
KA Kommentierte Ausgabe in 4 Bänden, ed. Manfred Engel, Ulrich Fülleborn
(Frankfurt: Insel, 1996)
SW Sämtliche Werke in 6 Bänden, ed. Ernst Zinn (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1959) [contains
poems and stories uncollected in the Kommentierte Ausgabe]
Sämtliche Werke Band 7: Übertragungen, ed. Karin Wais, Walter Simon (Frankfurt/
Leipzig: Insel, 1997)
TF Tagebücher aus der Frühzeit (Leipzig: Insel, 1942)
GB Gesammelte Briefe in 6 Bänden (Leipzig: Insel, 1936–40)
RB Briefe in 2 Bänden (Frankfurt: Insel, 1991)
EK Briefwechsel mit Ellen Key (Frankfurt: Insel, 1993)
LAS Lou Andreas-Salomé und Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1952)
Nietzsche
GW Gesammelte Werke in 3 Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta (Munich: Hanser, 1966)

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 INTRODUCTION
❖
‘Werden’ and its Variants

When Robert Musil, less than one month after Rainer Maria Rilke’s death in
December 1926, came to formulate the closing ‘Nachwort’ to his Rede zur Rilke-Feier
in Berlin, he found himself reaching for terms that would define the kind of ‘pure
poetry’ that he considered Rilke to embody:
Würde man eine Reihe aufstellen, an deren Ende das Lehrgedicht, die Allegorie,
das politische Gedicht zu stehen kämen, also Formen eines schon vorher fertigen
Wissens und Willens, so stünde am entgegengesetzten Ende Rilkes Gedichte
als reiner Vorgang und Gestaltung geistiger Mächte, die in ihm zum erstenmal
Namen und Stimme bekommen. [...] In solcher Bedeutung habe ich Rilke einen
Dichter genannt, der uns in die Zukunft führt.1
Musil posits Rilke’s poetry as the opposite of ‘engagiert’, specifically because the
socially motivated poem takes as its impetus ‘Formen eines schon vorher fertigen
Wissens und Willens’, whereas Rilke’s poems, Musil suggests, give voice to their
concerns only in the very process of creation. Thus he can say that they are ‘reiner
Vorgang’.
But what is this ‘process’? Whilst the Oxford English Dictionary defines process as ‘the
course of becoming as opposed to being’, how does this relate both to the fin de siècle
in general and to Rilke in particular? In his Tagebücher 1888–1904 the critic Hermann
Bahr suggests that this distinction can itself be seen as characteristic of modernity: ‘Die
Moderne ist alles seit dem Zusammenbruche des Individualismus: alles, was da nicht
ist, sondern wird.’2 This is the aesthetic of incipience so prevalent at the turn of the
century, which prefers beginnings to endings, which sees processes of becoming as
emblematic of an open-ended provisionality that pointedly defers its own completion
in order to foster further growth. It emerges specifically in Rilke’s poetry as a
continuing insistence on ‘Werden’, on a whole network of images, verbs and motifs
which foreground not only Rilke’s own development, but his preoccupation with
processes of development.
Even at its most objective, in the Neue Gedichte, Rilke’s poetry is not interested in
describing an already complete world, but rather in enacting it into being. His art
criticism, such an important counterpoint to his own creative endeavours, repeatedly
insists on an aesthetic of becoming, whether in the Worpswede artists, Rodin or
Cézanne:
Das ist nämlich auch mit der Art dieser Blätter untrennbar verbunden, daß sie
nicht wie Werke, sondern wie Werdestunden wirken, weiterwirken [...] man
schaut in sie wie in geheiligte Werkstätten, drinnen die schaffende Flamme sich

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 2 Introduction

bewegt und wächst, das ewige Feuer, in welchem Gestalten und Sterne sich
läutern und das, wenn es sich einmal besänftigt senkt, Bilder von unendlicher
Klarheit und blendender Vollendung zurückläßt.3
This study seeks to explore how this notion of a continuous process of becoming lies
at the very heart of Rilke’s poetics. Precisely because this ‘Freude des Werdens’ (TF,
p. 295) is continual, however, it is adumbrated by an infinite present tense. The Greek
distinction between Chronos and Aiôn may help us to understand this: Gilles Deleuze,
for instance, distinguishes in his Logique du sens between Chronos as ‘le présent toujours
limité’ and Aiôn as ‘le passé et le futur essentiellement illimités’.4 Rilke seems to
delineate a version of the former in his Tuscan diary:
Wir brauchen die Ewigkeit, denn nur sie gibt unseren Gesten Raum; und doch
wissen wir uns in enger Endlichkeit. Wir müssen also innerhalb dieser Schranken
eine Unendlichkeit schaffen, da wir an die Grenzlosigkeit nicht mehr glauben.
(TF, p. 71)
The paradoxical interpolation of ‘Unendlichkeit’ within the confines of ‘Endlichkeit’
can only take shape through a continuum of becoming, which thus comes to define
eternity in a sense analogous to that described by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus logico-
philosophicus — not as endlessness, but as a continual present tense, continually taking
shape:
Wenn man unter Ewigkeit nicht unendliche Zeitdauer, sondern Unzeitlichkeit
versteht, dann lebt der ewig, der in der Gegenwart lebt.5
This is precisely the role of art for Rilke, which explains his interests both critical and
creative. The work of art, and in Rilke’s own case the poem, opposes to the stasis of
its borders an infinite kinesis within, ‘innerhalb dieser Schranken eine Unendlichkeit’.
This balance between stasis and process we will see played out in particular in the
sculpture analysed in Rodin, and in the sonnets inspired by this ‘plasticity’ in the Neue
Gedichte. The seeming stasis of the plastic ‘Kunst-Ding’ is defined as kinesis held in
balance, a composite reciprocity of movement. This is perhaps the most striking
characteristic of this first period of maturity: it is precisely the formal constraint,
the perfect classical balance of a sculpture or sonnet, which protects and defines the
infinite potentiality within. For Rilke, art enshrines a kind of perpetual present tense
apart from everyday time, as he writes in his early diary:
Schützet die Kunst, daß sie nicht erfahre von dem Streit des Tages; denn ihre
Heimat ist jenseits aller Zeit. Ihre Kämpfe sind wie die Stürme, die den Samen
bringen, und ihre Siege sind dem Frühling ähnlich. Ihre Werke sind: unblutige
Opfer eines neuen Bundes. (TF, p. 48)
The similes, characteristically, point to processes of becoming: the seeds in the storms,
the promises of spring, the ‘Opfer eines neuen Bundes’. For Rilke then, art is pre-
cisely this infinite potentiality, ‘das heißt, nicht wirklich Vorhandenes, aber in jedem
Moment Schaffbares’ (TF, p. 292).
It is the objective of this book to pursue this insistence on a ‘process of becoming’
into Rilke’s own poetry, to undertake a systematic study of this ‘reiner Vorgang’. I will
seek to define process and continual motion as aspects of his poetry by examining
his use of a predominantly verbal, rather than nominal language, which circles

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 Introduction 3

continuously around images of growth. It is my contention that Rilke’s notion of

‘(Da)Sein’ is essentially predicated on a conception of ‘Werden’, and that it is this
that gives his poetry its dynamism — as he will write in Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte
Laurids Brigge, ‘in dem, was aufsteigt, ist eine ausgeruhte, neue Kraft, das aber, was
immer da war, ist müde von zu oftem Erinnern’ (KA III, p.498).This vitality manifests
itself in all facets of his poetry, from the grand conceptualizations of God, love, nature
and art to its most basic grammar and syntax, to its emphasis on an incipience which
Rilke so often equates with becoming: ‘weil ich noch nichts bin’, he writes to Ellen
Key, ‘so ganz Anfänger dessen, was ich werden muss.’6 My approach is precisely to
show how these broader themes emerge from the syntax, in the belief that it is the
very grammar of the poetry which enacts its meaning, and not simply the ideas and
images adduced. Thus, for example, I explore how the very form of the ubiquitous
present participle inscribes in Rilke’s poetics an insistence on a paradoxical state of
process, or how his use of gerunds, infinitives, prepositions and punctuation combines
to enact a sense of continuing becoming.
However, while the principal thrust of this study is therefore derived from close
textual analysis, it is also necessary to consider Rilke’s biography. His exploration of
processes of becoming develops hand in hand with the course of his own ‘becoming’,
and the relationship between the two, between the changing interest in instances of
‘Werden’ in his work and the changes in his actual life, is one of the most interesting
aspects of this area. Rilke’s relationships with artistic mentor figures and with women
both shapes, and is shaped by, this preoccupation. It is principally for this reason that
I concentrate in this book on the earlier, formative years of Rilke’s life, up to his first
sustained period of artistic mastery in 1907/8, in order to trace the growth of his
poetry as well as his poetry of growth. Much has been written about the astonishing
poetic craft of the later Duineser Elegien and Sonette an Orpheus, as well as his late
translations of Paul Valéry, yet none of this can be understood without exploring the
long apprentice years of the developing poet. This means, then, that we also need to
reflect upon the artistic influences fundamental to his stylistic development (amongst
which Russia, the Worpswede artists, and Rodin merit particular attention), in order
to establish how Rilke’s perspective on the question of ‘Werden’ develops over his
formative years.
This book is therefore in two parts, the first chronological and the second thematic,
a structure which crucially enables this juxtaposition of his changing style with his
consistent preoccupation with processes of becoming. Whilst the first part investigates
the individual collections in detail, the second part thus ranges more widely over the
whole period. Without the chronological detail of the chapters on the individual
collections, the broader perspectives, the comparisons and contrasts of the second
half of this book, would lack the necessary context. The recurring themes which are
picked up in this second half exceed the tighter boundaries of the first half, but grow
from them: following Rilke’s development chronologically brings out the extent to
which certain underlying preoccupations with processes of becoming persist, if in
altered forms, throughout all this earlier verse. When read in the light of the earlier
work, for instance, the Neue Gedichte emerge not as a definitive ‘new’ beginning for
the poet, but as an application of lessons learned at the turn of the century, from the

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 4 Introduction

Worpswede artists in particular. The justification for this slightly unusual structure
thus lies in the complementary perspectives which it opens up: the two sections are
designed to amplify each other whilst avoiding any overt repetition. Literary theory
would term these approaches synchronic and diachronic, since initially I consider the
poems as Rilke wrote them one by one, discretely, and then as he would have read
them, retrospectively. How does his awareness of his earliest work, of its strengths and
weaknesses, feed into his conception of his Parisian poetry? How does the interest in
processes of becoming take on new forms in the Neue Gedichte? These questions can
only be answered through this broader, twofold approach.
The first part starts with an examination of the intellectual climate as Rilke
experienced it at the turn of the century. The initial chapter draws on existing
scholarship and the poet’s own pronouncements in order to explore the major
influences on the young Rilke’s conception of processes of becoming. Nietzsche’s
insistence on ‘die Werde-Lust des Künstlers’7 is paramount, although the analysis
is more concerned with Rilke’s reception of Nietzsche than in the philosophy
itself. This is then juxtaposed with his reception of the dramatic theory of Maurice
Maeterlinck, exploring the extent to which Rilke draws similar conclusions from both
the philosopher and the playwright. The chapter also examines Rilke’s relationship
to the Jugendstil aesthetics so prevalent at the turn of the century, and the degree to
which his organic imagery of growth derives from this movement, whilst the final
principal influence analysed is Jens Peter Jacobsen and the extent to which his prose
suggested a model for transposing this visual Jugendstil technique into the written
word. The young Rilke’s derivative poetry needs to be seen as a product of its time,
for it can only be understood as a response to the late nineteenth-century cultural
context. Whilst the importance of these influences is arguably a commonplace of
Rilke criticism, the impetus which they give to his interest in processes of becoming
requires more specific consideration.
Chapter 2 discusses the earliest stages of Rilke’s poetic development (the verse before
the Stunden-Buch), re-assessing his juvenilia both on their own terms and as the embryo
of his subsequent work. It considers the wide range of images of growing, images that
can be seen as both biographical and poetological: Rilke’s self-consciousness about
poetic creation manifests itself in an early (and lasting) preoccupation with processes
of ‘becoming language’, through the agency of both simile and silence, assertion and
retraction. How, for the young poet, does the world become word? This is a question
that will resonate into the aesthetics of the Neue Gedichte. The sense of a poet finding
his way in these early books qualifies our appreciation of this later work, in that we can
feel him trying to work out a relationship between the world he wishes to describe
and his own creative processes. The imbalance between objectivity and subjectivity is
thus as instructive as its later equilibrium, since it is in the ultimate failure of this earlier
poetry that the success of the Neue Gedichte has its roots.
The third chapter considers the influence of Russia on Rilke’s conception of ‘der
werdende Gott’ in the Stunden-Buch, examining the book’s four year gestation period as
an instance of his own process of maturation.This emerges as a much more interesting
collection than is often thought, since its network of images of roots, darkness and
depth relates ultimately to more than just Rilke’s idiosyncratic conception of God.

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 Introduction 5

Within the context of his other works these images combine to suggest not only a
response to the trips to Russia, but also a broader sense of his dialectical conception of
becoming, as concerned with deferral as much as with development. The devotional
verse of the Stunden-Buch can in this sense be seen as a vehicle for this preoccupation,
rather than a genuine affirmation of piety.
After this close textual study the fourth chapter is more theoretical, exploring the
increasing ‘objectification’ of Rilke’s processes of creation under the influence of
visual art and sculpture as manifested in Worpswede, the Buch der Bilder,8 and Rodin.
From 1902 to 1907 a gradual transition can be discerned, from the conceptual process
of ‘Werden’ developed in the Stunden-Buch to the perceptual process implied in the
relationship to external ‘things’ in the Neue Gedichte. As an example of this Rilke’s
recurrent interest in the image of the tower is examined, exploring an aesthetics of
construction in the light of Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space and Theodor Lipps’
Ästhetik.
The final chapter of this first section considers the Neue Gedichte themselves, in
relation to the Rodin monograph and the Briefe über Cézanne. Two basic types of
process are suggested: linear development and circular self-containment. The former
follows Rilke’s established model, developed in the earlier poetry, of a teleological
becoming towards something. The latter, on the other hand, is particular to this new
style of poetry, an intransitive self-sufficiency modelled on Rodin’s sculptural style.
This would seem to suggest the traditional cliché of stasis in the Neue Gedichte, of
the ‘Dinggedicht’; yet in fact these poems bristle with internalized, self-contained
motion. Within these two distinctions we thus discuss the extent to which this
‘reine Bewegung’ can be said to be a displacement of Rilke’s preoccupation with
becoming on to these ‘Kunstdinge’ themselves. How successfully do they internalize
a balance between process and stasis? And how does this internalized process relate
to the overwhelmingly visual nature of the Neue Gedichte? This relationship between
perception and ‘Werden’, we conclude, is enacted principally in Rilke’s use of simile.
It is not merely the individual images themselves that are of interest, but also the
process of ‘sich bilden’ itself, as a version of ‘werden’ which relates specifically to
the making of these ‘Bilder’. It is ultimately this emphasis on image-making which
links the poet to his poems, which reconciles the aesthetics of observation with the
sculptural self-sufficiency of these ‘Dinggedichte’.
Having closely followed the development of Rilke’s conception of processes
of becoming through the various individual collections, in the second part of the
book we are in a position to consider the conceptual and grammatical implications
of ‘Werden’ across the whole range of this early poetry. The first of two chapters
discusses the problematic inverse of this preoccupation with process. A ‘poetics of
deferral’ is explored, examining, for example, ways in which the notion of ‘Vor-wand’
both facilitates and inhibits growth, or how the recurring term ‘Entfalten’ becomes
ambivalent. Rilke repeatedly pursues a pattern of what one might term reculer pour
mieux sauter, deferring development in the short term in order to encourage long-
term growth. This can be seen across the whole range of his early poetry, revealing a
surprising degree of conceptual consistency over this whole formative period, despite
the manifest changes in style and subject matter.

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 6 Introduction

This chapter also considers why the critical cliché of ‘stasis’ in the Neue Gedichte
needs to be understood as a Nietzschean ‘eternity of finite time’,9 which looks back
to Rilke’s earliest thought and poetry. It is only in placing this collection in the
broader context of his juvenilia that this becomes clear, that the images of stasis in
his verse emerge as descendants of the philosophy of eternal recurrence and Jugendstil
immanence absorbed in the 1890s. One of the incidental aims of this book is thus
to refine this conception of stasis as central to his work, by interpreting it rather as
the dialectical counterpart to becoming. This is where the twofold structure is such
an advantage, since it makes possible an examination of the consistency of Rilke’s
preoccupations across the whole period.
This consistency is conclusively illustrated by the final chapter, which traces patterns
that recur throughout the poetry, in order to suggest both how and why Rilke was
so centrally concerned with processes of becoming. We consider the various models
of beginnings and ends with which Rilke constructs his poetics, the relationship
between birth and death that is implicit in this, and the recurrent images of ‘Fülle’
and ‘Überfluß’ that mediate between the two. The book thus concludes by tracking
the development in Rilke’s poetry over this whole period from an interest in things
in process to a preoccupation with process in ‘things’, and by reading this ultimately
as a modulation from the passive into the active.
The critical context for such a study is necessarily wide, in as much as it implicates
every aspect of Rilke’s poetry. In particular the initial chapter on the early influences
owes much to previous scholarship: Erich Heller and more recently Richard Detsch
on Rilke and Nietzsche, Hans Panthel and Monika Ritzer on Rilke and Maeterlinck,
Paula Huber on Rilke and Jacobsen and Elisabeth Klein, Volker Klotz and Jost
Hermand on Rilke and Jugendstil. Much work has obviously been done on the
individual books, to which I am indebted: in particular, Robert Heygrodt (of the
earliest critics) and James Rolleston (of the later generations) on the earliest work, a
whole chapter of critics from Ruth Mövius through to Anna Tavis on the Stunden-
Buch, and Judith Ryan, amongst many others, on the Neue Gedichte. The latter’s
seminal Umschlag und Verwandlung, for example, usefully defines one kind of process in
one specific collection, against which one can set all the different verbs of growth that
Rilke uses to explore a poetics of becoming: ‘werden’, ‘wachsen’, ‘entfalten’, ‘steigen’,
‘kommen’, ‘bauen’, ‘sich bilden’. Even verbs which technically only define either
the beginning or the ending of a given process come to represent, in Rilke’s idiom,
synecdoches of becoming: ‘anfangen’, ‘gebären’, ‘vollenden’. Indeed, the recurrence of
all these quasi-synonyms is one way to navigate through this subject. Rolleston writes
that ‘many critics have approached Rilke through his key words, but the tendency
has been to concentrate on the metaphysically weighted terms (eg. ‘Engel’, ‘Puppe’,
‘Spiegel’) which so dominate the later poetry and to divorce them from their poetic
contexts in order to construct what is assumed to be Rilke’s Weltbild’.10 The main
approach of this study, in contrast, is to reinterpret key verbs in Rilke’s poetry, reading
his poetics of becoming as deriving from the movements of the verse, its actual
grammatical forms and processes, and not just the themes this grammar describes.
To this extent, closer critical readers have proved particularly useful, especially in
the second, more discursive part of this book. The deconstructions of Paul de Man
in his Allegories of Reading and the grammatical attentiveness of George Steiner in

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 Introduction 7

his Grammars of Creation have helped me to analyse the poetic strategies with which
Rilke constructs his world, particularly in the key verbs and prepositions which enact
this process. As Bachelard writes in relation to Rilke, ‘when we really live a poetic
image, we learn to know, in one of its tiny fibres, a becoming of being that is an
awareness of the being’s inner disturbance’.11 This study investigates Rilke’s relationship
to his own creativity through the leitmotif of this ‘becoming’.

Notes to Introduction
1. Robert Musil, Rede zur Rilke-Feier in Berlin (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1927), p. 18.
2. Hermann Bahr, Prophet der Moderne. Tagebücher 1888–1904 (Vienna: Böhlau, 1987), p. 45.
3. Letter to Otto Modersohn 19/11/1900, Gesammelte Briefe in 6 Bänden (GB), 6 vols (Leipzig: Insel,
1939), I, 139.
4. Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969), p. 77.
5. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984), 6.4311, p. 84.
6. Letter to Ellen Key, 14/2/1904, Briefwechsel mit Ellen Key (Frankfurt: Insel, 1993), [EK] p. 48.
7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie, Gesammelte Werke in 3 Bänden (GW), ed. Karl Schlechta
(Munich: Hanser, 1966), I, 58.
8. Given the wide range of dates of composition (1899–1906) as well as of styles in the Buch der Bilder,
it would be misleading to discuss the collection as a coherent whole in this study, since the aim
of this book is to juxtapose the chronology of Rilke’s development with his changing interest in
processes of ‘Werden’. I have therefore decided to discuss its individual poems where appropriate
throughout the whole book, and not simply in this single chapter.
9. Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 142.
10. James Rolleston, Rilke in Transition: An Exploration of his Earliest Poetry (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 1970), p. 1.
11. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1994), p. 220.

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