Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from Rilke: The Last Inward Man by Lesley Chamberlain, out this month from Pushkin Press.

It can only be symbolic to call one of the greatest European poets of the 20th century the last inward man. Some of us, perhaps at different stages in our lives, will always be attracted to the mystical and the metaphysical. On the other hand, the age of inwardness, the flowering of cultures in the West that were individualistic and reflective, has passed. Rilke himself experienced a great shift in attitude, as more organized forms of religious worship, and faith itself, dwindled in his lifetime. He was never a believer in God. But still the idea, or, rather, the feeling of God, meant a great deal to him. This is one clue to what makes him not only a great poet but an important figure historically. His reputation was at its height, early in the 20th century, when the cultural momentum was suddenly intensely secular and political. The politically engaged future challenged what art should be. Rilke’s “angels” and “roses” suddenly seemed absurdly irrelevant. Yet it seems to me Rilke’s achievement, and his standing, are all the more poignant, viewed from this crossroads in time.

In 1926, when he died aged only 51, “everyone” was reading Rainer Maria Rilke, if by everyone we can mean the English novelist Virginia Woolf and, say, the future American art critic Meyer Schapiro, who made his first trip to Europe carrying Rilke in his pocket. The Austrian modernist novelist Robert Musil was another huge admirer, while in France André Gide, a delicate novelist caught between religious inwardness and Nietzschean amoralism, and Paul Valéry, a modernist poet of comparable complexity, had both met Rilke and held him in high artistic esteem.

Musil hailed the richness of Rilke’s language in a lengthy memorial address in 1927. But then, just 10 years later in German-speaking circles, and just a little later in Britain, with the outbreak of war, Rilke was no longer relevant. The German critical avant-garde favored the imagination of Kafka, a poet writing a new kind of prose; and Brecht, a poet who wanted to change the world by revolutionizing the dramatic stage.

It’s easy to see why. Rilke was too refined. He appealed to an educated minority. Brecht by contrast was about to transform the lyric poem, and the very concept of theatre, in the hope of addressing the mass of people. His task was to welcome them—and their experience, and their language, rougher and hungrier and more spontaneous—into the cultural mainstream. Kafka’s parables of the mysterious ways of authority meanwhile tapped a new kind of political experience. This was how the confused ordinary man found himself up against menacing “higher” authorities. The pressure of authority was constantly there yet so hard to grasp that it went without a name. Political references back to Kafka would abound throughout the totalitarian 20th century, whereas it was said that Rilke was not political at all. And that was true, though not, as we shall see, the whole story. Meanwhile, I wonder if any account of a great artist read in many countries, absorbed into diverse cultures, can ever be the whole story. Germany–Austria, France, Britain, and the United States all had their particular Rilke timelines in the last century. Within that comparison American readers seemed to have loved Rilke uninterruptedly, because he gifted them a moving critique of the pace and style of industrial life, which otherwise they could often not bear. Rilke gave, and still gives, a function for poetry to help any and all of us withstand the materialist–technological onslaught. He is a secular bulwark, spiritual but not religious, something these days increasingly rare.

The European timeline reflected the way that spiritual influence became old-fashioned so quickly, with the Continent wracked by war and in political crisis. Poetry modernized itself radically and became more social in the politically charged 1930s, in Germany especially, after defeat against England, and hyperinflation, and the rise of nationalism and organized labor power. England itself followed, but more spasmodically, and at a decade’s remove, and never with quite the same relentlessness. Still, all this, and the speed of change, was a revolution, and, from our point of view here, a revolution in sensibility—a revolution in the way things were felt and evaluated. This new revolution had everything to do with what “modern” and “modernism” in literature meant. Those cultural phenomena—for they were more phenomenal than consciously organized—had in their turn other causes too.

Two or three decades earlier, above all, there had been an aesthetic revolution, of which Oscar Wilde and Henry James caught the outside edge, and Rilke was touched by it too. Indeed he was closer to the hub of the wheel. He was driving the change. It was there in the way he wrote. He was subjective. He wanted to tell the world about his inner feelings and how hard he found it to place himself in the world. Some of that difficulty had to do with the early years of the 20th century, and the very way he recorded his inwardness reflected the need to find a new way to say how anxious he was. And yet, at the same time, he didn’t entirely leave the 19th century and its calmness—and in German literature its regionalism—behind.

I will often talk about “art” in this book [Rilke: The Last Inward Man]. I don’t like “the arts” because that is already a commercial concept and a commodity. It’s the way art goes because artists have to live, and because people who can afford it, and many who can’t, want art in their lives and find a way to buy or borrow or steal it. But there, I’m saying what they want—what I want—is art, not “the arts.” It’s a great need. At the same time the word, somehow misleading in English, doesn’t just mean painting. As I use the word “art” I mean everything encompassed by the German word die Kunst. That includes music, sculpture, poetry, and drama. (Film would be there, except it’s too early in Rilke’s lifetime, and his particular experience, for film.) The idea of art binds all these creative activities together in a refined, deeply worked response to what is human. Nature may be inimitably beautiful, dramatic, portentous, and sublime. We can read many messages into nature. But it can never produce, of itself, what art and artists give us, namely, a record of how the life around us collides with, and stimulates, our imagination.

Take music. Classical music offers a fabulous example of what was happening to art in Rilke’s Austria and Germany in the early 20th century. Though audiences protested, already Schoenberg’s atonal music seemed to express the modern technology-driven condition. It was exciting, bewildering, but also repetitive and seemingly forever unfinished. The sentimental human heart suddenly didn’t know where to take refuge—and nowhere was probably the implicit answer. Face up to modernity, that is, to a certain new kind of bleakness and rawness, exposed by the age of the machine. Don’t hide away.

The neo-Romantic style of composition which preceded Schoenberg was quite different. Schoenberg himself caught the tail end of the fashion, which is why many Romantic listeners prefer the richly textured, but still tonal, early work. Personally I love to embed myself in the First String Quartet in D Minor, op. 7. I can find a home there—the kind of “spiritual” home Rilke would often allude to, and meaning a home in the imagination. The neo-Romantics were composers like late Brahms and the searingly emotive Hugo Wolf. Their emotionally laden and discordant harmonies pointed ways out of the 19th century. But they did not compel the abiding Western tradition to reinvent itself, as Schoenberg did, perhaps regrettably, but necessarily, after he left that op. 7 behind.

Early Schoenberg was in-between, and in-between is roughly where I think we should place Rilke too, between these two moments in music, that is, the last notes of romanticism and the first signs of rupture. Rilke’s intensely individually felt lyrics and his so-called “thing-poems,” his elegies and his sonnets were new and unique, and yet they could be absorbed into what went before—even centuries before. And so on their evidence Rilke seems, like the earliest Schoenberg, not yet “modern” enough.

But to call Rilke conservative and exclusively aesthetic-minded diverts attention precisely from what made him new. The world he addressed was losing its spirituality, and just as Schoenberg felt music needed a new language, so Rilke toyed with whether the old language could continue: what it could refer to, and mean, as references like God and the soul lost credibility.

Rilke worked with a limited range of physical experiences. His life had a narrow focus. But his poems grew into huge questions. Born in Prague, in 1875, and living in Munich, he travelled to Italy just before the 19th century ended. In Rome and Florence he began to test his secular faith in the great humanist tradition. He went to Russia, spent a year in the north-German countryside, and moved, in 1902, to Paris. Confined to Munich during the Great War he was only modestly peripatetic thereafter, and gratefully accepted a Swiss bolthole purchased in his name for his last five years. When he died in 1926, of leukemia, having struggled with terrible pain for the last two of those years, his poetry was dazzlingly new to his ever-increasing number of readers—and yet still covering ground that preoccupied him as a young man.

And so we go, back and forth, sideways into the new age. What made Rilke creative was how he responded to his limited series of environments. He relished nature and works of art everywhere, and lived among animals, birds and trees, under dark and light skies. The wind and the stars and the soil were strong presences, but people were relatively scarce. He saw them as strangers, mostly, from a distance, although there were a few people he knew well, and studied, and remembered, in a handful of special poems. Meanwhile he loved, and noticed, colors, cathedrals, Greek sculptures and children’s merry-go-rounds, and flowers. Two of his most famous short poems evoked the hydrangea and the rose, and, like Van Gogh, he was fascinated by once-beautiful forms of life—blossoms, most notably—in decline. But then not only flowers. He spent months of sponsored solitude in some of the minor family houses where the entire European aristocracy—German, Danish, Bohemian—was declining. Whether we read him in the original German, or whether we come to him as the English Rilke, or the French Rilke, or the Japanese Rilke, or read him in Braille, he is a great poet, for the music of his language, and preoccupations like this, that link him to other artists, and to his times.

What made him great though, for it surely wasn’t just some kind of relevance? To repeat the question and anticipate the answer this book gives, I would say he was trying to find a new sensibility for the 20th century, at a time when a certain style of philosophy had not yet made “the meaning of life” a naive question. His poems concern our gender and sexuality, our sense of what we ought to be doing with our lives, the possibility of the existence of God, the charmed kinship with animals which brings us such happiness, the importance of childhood, the attraction of the physical objects we make and buy and choose to live among, the landscapes we respond to, the books we read, and the paintings in whose company we live. There is no object under Rilke’s gaze that resists transformation into a feature of a marvelous universe that envelops us in a world that might otherwise leave us restless and afraid.

Human existential identity was the conundrum. Rilke searched not for a definition but for places and seasons that would allow him to speak of it. So it is a marvelous experience to follow daily life with his eyes, through the park and along the street, and occasionally into a more exotic landscape. The search was not for a vantage point but for a metaphor. The metaphor once found, he could transform anything. He doesn’t need clichéd Romantic inspiration to enchant his readers. In his tenth Duino Elegy, for instance, he lists the kinds of places humans frequent: “Stelle, Siedlung, Lager, Boden, Wohnort,” and we can immediately feel something significant about ourselves in that thesaurus-like list. Each of those five German words is an approximation or an aspect of something that actually we feel every day. Since they can all roughly mean “place to live” the question is: where are we? Where do we dwell? Where do we call home, and for what reason? More questions follow. For instance, in what place do we flower and bear fruit before, like flowers, we too fade and drop? Where do we plant ourselves and where do we flourish? Ripeness is one of Rilke’s preoccupations too, just as much as decline.

How to translate that string of places varies. It’s “place and dwelling, camp and ground and home” for Vita and Edward Sackville-West, the very first translators of the Elegies; “place and settlement, foundation and soil and home” for the outstanding contemporary translator Stephen Mitchell; “soil, place, village, storehouse, home” for the eccentric but sometimes illuminating Rilke pilgrim William Gass. The point, though, however more or less successfully the nuances of the original are rendered, is that all kinds of places matter to us: our geographical location, the place we have settled with others, the place we have chosen to rest; where we were born; what is our present address. Add landscapes: mountains, valleys, meadows, streams, the river Nile, the bridge at Ronda, an ancient volcano. And townscapes: marketplaces, post offices. All these “locations” bring out features of our human existence to help us speculate on what we are doing here, on this earth, in what Rilke indirectly called our Weltraum, literally the space our world occupies, though also conventionally the universe. For me the right translation of the word, or, more often, evocation of the thought, will sometimes be “space and time.”

By 1899, as he came of age amidst the most important love affair of his life, and scored his first great literary success, Rilke was well aware of the pressures falling on an idealized conception of humanity. The task of his still nominally Christian generation was crucially to respond to Darwin. Reflecting that challenge of an evolved rather than a divinely created humanity, Rilke occasionally expressed a wish to have studied biology. He did take a class in Munich just as the century turned. But mostly he read a little and improvised. The point is that he was caught up in the great onslaught of the secular that followed the collapse of a Biblical version of the past. The avalanche was set in motion by persuasive evidence that it was not a force called God that created the world, according to some divine plan whose alleged goodness and higher rationality had long troubled the critical and the suffering. Evolution—though it could be made to include God, by some—was more plausible. And so Rilke, never in so many words, registered the death of God. But like Nietzsche he was radically engaged in seeking “superabundant substitutes” for discredited metaphysical consolations, enjoying them even as they faded. Nietzsche’s spirit was one of bold independence of mentality and phrase, and, likewise, Rilke sought out those substitutes in his own stunningly rich German language—a language not “faded” at all but rather intensely vibrant.

For much of my life I’ve felt drawn to Rilke precisely because in his presence art can still stand in for a dying capacity for spiritual contemplation. But I’ve learned to approach him now with some reservation. Theodor Adorno, the critic who in 1936 insisted the future was Kafka and not Rilke, branded Rilke’s inner life a pernicious escapism, discouraging political awareness. Adorno was also the critic who not 15 years later declared that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Yet it seems obvious that the greatest poet of the Holocaust, Paul Celan, like Rilke another Germanophone writer from another corner of the lately defunct Austrian Empire, was deeply influenced by Rilke’s evocation of the materiality of all things human. For Celan, in the light of human evil the only moral building material left was language woven about earthly stuff. Moreover, from where did a German-Jewish poet in the postwar years learn that craft of language, and find a vision of equal power, but from Rilke? Both poets understood: if there is some power of goodness which shows up in the making of works of art, it is what compels us to go on reaching for the right words in the right order to give that goodness some flimsy hold on life.

Take another critic of Rilke’s “inwardness” in his own time: the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said Rilke was poisonous. Yet we need dig only a little into Wittgenstein’s own private life to find that he too was wrestling with his own introspective and depressive nature, and, surely in some way both unconscious and profound, did not want to be reminded of it in the poetry he read. Consciously Wittgenstein was as dependent on his philosophical gift for the sense of his life as Rilke was on the poetic, and had a comparable fear of loss. On the one hand Wittgenstein was deeply immersed in inwardness through his love of music; only the philosophical value was problematic because it couldn’t be articulated; and then in the later work he insisted the inner life lacked value.

Rilke—and I’m not the first to think this—was possibly given to us to help us withstand Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein’s particular focus was how we use language to make claims about truth and to communicate with each other. It helps me to imagine that for Wittgenstein language was a factory, like all the new factories around him in his time, and what it manufactured was meaning, pleasure and the possibility of agreement, alongside a great deal of confusion. Rilke meanwhile dwelt in a world of cities and of nature, of post offices and parklands and merry-go-rounds, and what he did was watch how human beings craft and fabricate the world they use. The disagreement with Rilke never came to a head between the two men. They never met. But had they done so, and had a critic been present as a mediator, he or she would have wanted to persuade the philosopher that Rilke’s poetry was art, and not a continuation of metaphysics by other means. It was about how we have our being in the world: how we use its artifacts to weave temporary meanings. The words alone are not enough. We have to keep rejoining them to the objects to which it is possible for them to point, by way of our enjoyment and enlightenment and contact with each other. There is an obvious relation to what Wittgenstein was doing, but Wittgenstein stayed within the network of words, whereas Rilke sought a bodied result. I mean by that poetry that speaks of and to our physical existence, and is thus, to my mind, much more satisfying than a philosophy of language that rather strips away the pleasure. For exactitude is not the only value attached to human communication. Rilke evokes our relation to iron and stone and says for instance that this is how we are, embedded in our material world. Perhaps therefore we don’t need to know more than what this pillar of stone knows, having endured through millennia. Embedded in materials, located beneath the sky, leading diurnal lives, we shelter ourselves and we build. Of course it’s not enough, in an age of science; in the modern age. Even so, from the wall and the pillar, the house and the panther, the king and the work of art, we live among a mass of active co-presences, and that is also our condition, alongside the pursuit of knowledge. Sometimes Rilke finds the fact of that existential condition schrecklich, “terrifying,” but often it is also wondrous.