Ralph Freedman, professor emeritus of comparative literature at Princeton University is also the author of Hermann Hesse: Pilgrim of Crisis.
"Lively and detailed." --Michael Hofmann, New York Times Book
Review
"What Freedman's book does, and more thoroughly than any of the
other biographies, is to retell Rilke's story meticulously and with
a welcome attention to the circumambient social and political
circumstances." --New Republic
Rilke's poems Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, among others, make him one of the great poets of the century. His day-to-day living, on the other hand, is quite uneventful and not particularly admirable, and Freedman (Rilke: A Biography, Random, 1988) does not enliven it. Rilke's passionate commitment to art was counterbalanced by a pathological incapacity for true intimacy that slipped into cold cruelty and a weakness for the ease and favor of aristocratic patronage, travel (with a tendency to misunderstand and sentimentalize the cultures he saw), depression, and illness. Freedman proficiently documents the movements, affairs, and preoccupations that served as raw material and provocation for Rilke's art. Yet the author gives us no real insight into Rilke's life or work. It is in the poems and other creations where the reader will meet the man. For academic libraries. [Rilke's newly published Uncollected Poems are reviewed on p. 116.-Ed.]-Richard Kuczkowski, Dominican Coll., Blauvelt, N.Y.
"Lively and detailed." --Michael Hofmann, New York Times Book
Review
"What Freedman's book does, and more thoroughly than any of the
other biographies, is to retell Rilke's story meticulously and with
a welcome attention to the circumambient social and political
circumstances." --New Republic
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