This illuminating article about Rilke, Rodin, Auden, Balzac, Steichen, Yeats, Sandburg, Brodsky, Cezanne and Paula Modersohn-Becker (here quoted in part) was written under the title "Genius Envy" by Geoff Dyer. The interactions between artists intimate and remote are very telling of Rilke's and Rodin's evolution as poet and sculptor: -- "After Rodin, the next important influence on Rilke was C�zanne. Rilke’s Letters on C�zanne reveals the enormous influence of the C�zanne retrospective in Paris, in the summer of 1907. He discovered there not a refutation but an intensification of what he had learned from Rodin: fruits, in C�zanne’s still lifes, 'cease to be edible altogether, that’s how thinglike and real they become, how simply indestructible in their stubborn thereness.' And again, as with Rodin (but more confidently and explicitly now), what he discovers is important primarily for what it enables Rilke to realize about himself and his own work: 'It’s not really painting I’m studying. . . . It was the turning point which I recognised, because I had just reached it in my own work or had at least come close to it somehow, after having been ready, probably for a long time, for this one thing which so much depends on.'
The extent to which this breakthrough into “limitless objectivity” was achieved is revealed in “Requiem for a Friend” (1908). The poem was written in response to the death, several weeks after giving birth, of the artist Paula Modersohn-Becker (who had discovered C�zanne years earlier). It is, simultaneously, a lament for his friend and an essay on the art to which they were both indebted:
For that is what you understood: ripe fruits.
You set them before the canvas, in white bowls,
and weighed out each one’s heaviness with your colors.
Women too, you saw, were fruits; and children, molded
from inside, into the shapes of their existence.
And at last you saw yourself as a fruit, you stepped
out of your clothes and brought your naked body
before the mirror, you let yourself inside
down to your gaze; which stayed in front, immense,
and didn’t say: I am that; no: this is.
So free of curiosity your gaze
had become, so unpossessive, of such true
poverty, it had no desire even
for you yourself; it wanted nothing: holy.
(from Stephen Mitchell’s translation)
There are several directions one might follow from here: From C�zanne to poems by Charles Tomlinson (“C�zanne at Aix” in Seeing is Believing [1960]) and Jeremy Reed (“C�zanne” in Nineties [1990]). Or, sticking with Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker, to Adrienne Rich’s important corrective, “Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff” (Clara was Paula’s friend and Rilke’s wife), in which a poet speaks as a painter addressing a poet—thereby offering a crisp critique of Rilke:
Do you know: I was dreaming I had died
giving birth to the child.
I couldn’t paint or speak or even move.
My child—I think—survived me. But what was funny
in the dream was, Rainer had written my requiem—
a long, beautiful poem, and calling me his friend.
I was your friend
but in the dream you didn’t say a word.
In the dream his poem was like a letter
to someone who has no right
to be there but must be treated gently, like a guest
who comes on the wrong day.
In real life our chances of meeting people are limited and contingent. In the realm of art and literature those constraints are removed; everyone is potentially in dialogue with everyone else irrespective of chronology and geography."
{excerpt} q1 -- http://www.poetryfoundation.org/arch...html?id=180435
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Originally Posted by Chester
