The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory

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Rilke and Eliot: Tradition and Poetry

Frank Wood

To cite this article: Frank Wood (1952) Rilke and Eliot: Tradition and Poetry, The Germanic
Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 27:4, 246-259, DOI: 10.1080/19306962.1952.11786636

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19306962.1952.11786636

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 RILKE AND ELIOT: TRADITION AND POETRY
ByFrankWood

C
I

OMPARISONS are apt to be as odious in literary criticism as else­

where and it is far from my intention to subject to such a process
two major modern poets of such different backgrounds, range of
interest, and quality of temperament. Fortunately we do not have to
consider the matter of "influences," as understood by certain once fashion­
able schools of comparative literature. Rilke's familiarity with England
and its literature was practically negligible, while Eliot's appreciably
greater contacts with Germany seem only to have evolved a negative
superciliousness with respect to its literature (particularly Goethe). Even
if such evidence of cross-fertilization were available, it would lead to re­
sults far less important than evidence, supported by structural parallels
and analogies, of the invisible operations of the Zeit,geist in two impressive
bodies of poetry and criticism. "Genuine criticism," writes E. R. Curtius,
"does not set out to prove but only reveal. lts metaphysical background
rests on the conviction that the spiritual world is organized on affinity
systems."1 As perhaps the two most representative poets of our age, in
what way do Eliot and Rilke represent it? What body of poetic experience
do they draw on for that purpose? Do elements of their poetry and criti­
cism in any way intersect at a given point? lt would be surprising, in
view of a certain universality of appeal enjoyed by both, if there were not
some unity of focus, of "affinity systems" to which their creative efforts
were directed. In this connection it is worth recalling that the year 1922
witnessed the appearance of Joyce's Ulysses, Valery's Charmes, and Rilke's
Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus.
lt is to such questions that I should like to provide some tentative
answers, signaling out a point of reference here and there, bringing to the
fore the more conspicuous features of their work shared in common. And
I shall begin with a discussion of tradition which will lead to a considera­
tion of various poetic motifs and themes in their adaptations and, finally,
to the practice of poetry as a craft within whatever sense we decide to
give to the term tradition.
To recent generations the critical writings of Eliot, particularly the
essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1920), have made this as­
pect of criticism a focal point for discussion. My intention is to analyze
what is meant by tradition by both Eliot and Rilke, and not to fit Rilke
into the specialized forms of Eliot's thinking, or vice versa. If the latter
1 E. R. Curtius, "T. S. Eliot" in Kritische Essays zur Europdischen Literatur (Bern:
Francke, 1950), p. 300.
 RILKE AND ELIOT 247

procedure were advisable, an alignment of Hofmannsthal with Eliot, or

Eliot with R. A. Schröder, as the Schaeders have done, might seem more
plausible and fruitful. lt is only too patent that, on some very vital mat­
ters, such as the functioning of God and Christianity in the modern world,
with all that this i.mplies for the understanding of morality, guilt, sex, the
role of man in society, both Rilke and Eliot are poles apart. This does not
mean, however, that we are free to overlook the many i.mportant links
that bring them together.
To begin with, both Eliot and Rilke have had constantly to face the
charge that, in one respect, their poetry was a kind of Alexandrian para­
sitism, a storehouse of well-remembered reading. There is nothing logically
derogatory, as Curtius points out, in the fact that we live in a Hellenistic
age or that Eliot and Rilke are, in the best sense, Alexandrian poets.
Granted that such poetry is that of connoisseurship, the knowledge of
languages, literary allusions, and choice reminiscences of wide, eclectic
reading, we may still wish, with Curtius, the emphasis placed on the posi­
tive values ("Connoisseurship, literary knowledge would only be despi­
cable ü the literature itself were. For literature without tradition is destiny
without history-uncomprehended, unpossessed.")2 rather than on the
negative viewpoint, of, say, Stephen Spender: "For in Eliot, as in a dozen
other modern artists-as in Joyce, in Proust, in Baudelaire, in Rilke even
-one never is far removed from connotation: from the trick of the ob­
ject, or the psychological symptom, or the historic parallel, or the apt
quotation quickly observed and noted down; always the one particular
thing uniquely expressed and treated as a symptom. One notices further
that there is a tendency in the work of all these artists to regard life as an
illness, and themselves (although they, too, are very seriously ill) as
doctors or nurses or spiritual fathers, or mere affectionate holders of
fading hands.... "3
In Eliot's case not even the most sympathetic critic ever questions the
fact that his verse "bears everywhere evidence of how his reading has
been carried alive into his mind, and thus of his conception of poetry 'as
a living whole of all the poetry that has been written.' "4 The emphasis
here, of course, is on alive, in the sense in which Eliot once wrote in an
unpublished lecture on the method of Ulysses: "In some minds certain
memories, both from reading and life, become charged with emotional
significance.'' 6 Towards the end of his life, and after the completion of his
great work, Rilke also made generous acknowledgment of the inßuences
of authors and books on his formative years, characteristically giving the
1 Curtius, op. cit., p. 302.
1 Stephen Spender, The Destructive Element (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1936), pp.
132-39.
4 F. 0. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (London: Oxford University

Press, 1935), p. 8.
1 Ibid., p. 55.
248 THE GERMANIC REVIEW

preference, however, to the "memories from life." "I always ask myself
whether that which was in itself unaccented did not exercise the most
essential influence on my development and production." 8 There follows a
list of these una.ccented "occasions " which have been worked into so
much of the texture of Rilke's poetry: hours spent with a dog or watching
a Roman ropemaker or a Nile potter or the shepherds of Baux, memories
of cities like Venice and the landscapes of his travels. He then continues:
"No, into these simple transactions that life performs with us, books, at
least later, cannot extend entirely decisive influence.... The question
about influences is naturally possible and admissible and there may be
cases where the answer carries with it the most surprising disclosures;
however, no matter how that answer reads, it must promptly be rendered
again to the life from which it stems and, in a sense, be newly dissolved
in it .... " 7 Both poets' use of literary (artistic, religious, mythological,
etc.) allusion is a vital part of their poetry,yet quite differently employed,
in keeping with their different poetic organizations. Eliot's sources are
either documented, as in The Waste Land, or subtly but still recognizably
woven into the verse-mosaic, as in Four Quartets. The method of Rilke,
the intuitive poet, is another matter. He recasts his sources, derived from
a welter of sensuous and intellectual memories, until they are practically
irrecognizable, fused with the genuine core of his expression.8
We come at once to the fundamental question as to the role played by
tradition in the work of both poets and the kind or kinds of tradition we
mean. "Tradition and the Individual Talent," a basic critical document
for Eliot's generation, is most explicit on the subject. For Eliot tradition
is primarily "the historical sense ...a sense of the timeless as weil as the
temporal, and of the timeless and the temporal together."9 Such conscious­
ness of the past is only to be acquired by concentration and hard labor.
Rilke's intuitive sense of tradition stresses the timeless rather than the
temporal. In setting off Eliot's sense of history against that possessed by
Yeats, Valery, and Rilke, Delmore Schwartz rather patronizingly writes:
"Rilke is inspired by great works of art, by Christ's mother and by Or­
pheus. Yet in each of these authors the subject is transformed into a
timeless essence. The heritage of Western culture is available to these
authors and they use it in many beautiful ways; but the fate of Western
culture and the historical sense as such do not become an important part
of their poetry." 10
1 Rilke, Letter8, Vol. II, 1910-19t6. Translated by Jane Bannard Greene and M. D.
Herter-Norton (New-York: W. W. Norton, 1947), pp. 334f.
7 lbid.
1 For the Sonnet8 to OrpheU8 Rilke does annex a few documentations and discloses a
slight worry, towards the end of his life, that his meanings may puzzle the reader.
• Eliot, The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1920), p. 49.
10 Delmore Schwartz, "T. S. Eliot as the International Hero," Parti8an Review,
XII (Spring, 1945), 199f.
 RILKE AND ELIOT 249

In the sense that tradition, a certain kind of orthodox tradition, imposes

a moral responsibility on the poet towards the values of his own society
in conjunction with those of the past, Rilke obviously does not fit the bill.
For Rilke's world is pre-history, the Garden before the Fall, and his wide
ranging through the fields of Western culture only served to detach subjec­
tively selected aspects, elevated to an existential timelessness beyond
chronology and historical process. That Rilke was very concerned
with tradition, however, and in what way he was concerned, is clear from
a letter to Leopold von Schlözer (March 30, 1923):

To preserve tradition-1 mean not the superficially conventional but what is of

real descent (even if not around us, where circumstances tie it off more and more,
then in us)-and to continue it clearly or blindly, according to one's disposition,
may for us ... be the most crucial task. The impulse to contribute to its ful­
fillment something of my own, something comparatively precise, urged forth last
year, in a few days, a number of sonnets .... My inclination to establish this
very link with the greatest and most powerful part of tradition, yes, obedience to
the inner indication to set this attempt within my work above every other, will
serve, moreover, to elucidate for you many passages that deny themselves on
first or second glance.11

The Sorinets to Orpheus, then, in this moment of rare critical self-evaluation,

are Rilke's contribution to tradition. How typically Rilkean are the eva­
sive expressions "according to one's disposition" and "something com­
paratively precise," locutions that would make Eliot writhe. Here, emo­
tionally and aesthetically, Rilke and Eliot part company. lt would almost
seem preposterous, at first glance, to label as tradition the eclectic and
isolated themes and motifs of the Sonnets-these roses and Apollos, uni­
corns, Roman sarcophagi, the movements of a dancer, the taste of a fruit,
all interspersed with admonitions of the Zeitgeist. They are the contents
of experience, of course, from Hellenic and Judaeo-Christian times to the
present. And if one misses the adhesive of tradition, in the form of a
certain kind of history, the question is justified why such history, for the
organic poet like Rilke or even Goethe, should necessarily constitute a
conspicuous element of tradition. lt is true that Rilke's timelessness, out
of the range of history, places all aesthetic objects on one plane in the
foreground; they consequently lack a certain perspective and dimension­
ality, like the bas-reliefs of Rilke's favorite Egyptian sculpture with their
simultaneity and pre-empted futurity:

... dem eigenen Lächeln

sing sie voran, wie das Rossegespann in den milden
muldigen Bildern von Kamak dem siegenden König. [Sixth Elegy]
11 Rilke, Letters, II, 326.
250 THE GERMANIC REVIEW

There is quite a different intention behind Eliot's

Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal [The Wast.e Land]
and Rilke's
Wo immer du eintratst, redete nicht in Kirchen
zu Rom und Neapel ruhig ihr Schicksal dich an?
Oder es trug eine Inschrift sich erhaben dir auf,
wie neulich die Tafel in Santa Maria Formosa ... . [First Elegy)
"History did not interest Rilke," writes Holthusen, "but its already­
having-existed ('ihr Gewesensein'), that is to say, old cities like Venice
and Paris, castles, parks, cathedrals, temples, towers, museums, memoirs,
old letters."12 The artefacts of history, in other words, interested him
with the omission of the human factor: that omission is the essential
weakness in Rilke's conception of tradition. In skirting humanity in that
hold trajectory from the divine to the world of things Rilke allegedly
made no allowance for "incomprehensible humans." He intended that the
contours of his angels and animals, children and roses, heroes and great
lovers should be abstracted from the human (how aesthetically possible
this is is another matter). In failing to distinguish between spirit and
nature Rilke's monism frequently leaves in his poetry the impression of
achieved designs with great empty spaces around them. Such monism or
pantheism Eliot specifically rejects as "not European," in connection,
oddly enough, with the English Romantic opposition's insistence on "the
unreclaimed Teutonic element in us. "13 The issue raises again the hoary
specters of Classicism and Romanticism and we accordingly assume that
the entire Romantic School in Germany, its literature and philosophy, are
rejected by Eliot as "not European." Rilke's attitude towards humanity,
however, brings a curious paradox to light. In his work this attitude is
certainly not more negative, and in many respects less so, than Eliot's.
Precisely because we as readers are required to fill in the "empty spaces,"
with the actual poetic realizations before us of the wonder and beauty
inherent in Western civilization, there is always an opening for hope and
optimism, however construed, in our present situation. lt is as though Rilke
were requesting us, as humans, to live up to the great exemplars of what
proceeded, after all, from the creative mind and hand of man. This, I
believe, is the great source of Rilke's universality today.
11 Hans Egon Holthusen, "Rilkes Letzte Jahre
" in Der unbehaU8te Memch (Mün­
chen: Piper, 1951), pp. 43f.
11 Eliot, "The Function of Criticism in Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace,
"
1932), pp. 16f.
 RILKE AND ELIOT 251

What seems more important than our poets' independent uses of tradi­
tion is their general attitude towards the maintenance of some kind of
tradition in the modern world where the sense of it has largely vanished.
In a very special regard both Eliot and Rilke are preservers and not in­
novators, the typical sign manual of the Alexandrian poet. This is not to
overlook their technical discoveries and applications which have "schooled"
so many modern writers, yet both are inordinately concerned with con­
solidating the present with the gains of the past, a gesture replete in each
case with either stoic or Christian fortitude and humility. I take it that
when Eliot wrote in 1920 that "we fight rather to keep something alive
than in the expectation that anything will triumph," and in 1922, in The
Waste Land, "These fragments have I shored against my ruins," he is
stating what Rilke had previously formulated in the Kalkreuth Requiem
(1908): "Wer spricht von Siegen? Überstehn ist alles!" The fact that Eliot
turned subsequently to the tradition of the Catholic Church in England
while Rilke carried his conservatism a stage further into the transforma­
tion theme of the Ninth Duino Elegy and on into the quaint idea (Hule­
wicz letter of November 13, 1925) that we are the'"bees of the invisible"
merely emphasizes their role as preservers of tradition.
How narrowly defined the term "tradition" has become in the last two
decades, chiefl.y as a result of Eliot's essay, becomes apparent when one
considers a recent German publication: Ein Weg zu T. S. Eliot. 14 Grete
and Hans Schaeder follow the latest Anglo-German party line (Hofmanns­
thal-R. A. Schröder-Eliot) with a quite frank bias against the native
opposition (Hölderlin-Nietzsche-Rilke). The latter are responsible, they
claim, for a certain "Maßstabverrenkung" in German critical evaluation of
poetry and of the poet. Commenting on Eliot's postwar style that blends
traditionalism with modernism, in contrast to Valery's formal classicism,
the authors grudgingly concede a superficial analogy to Eliot in Rilke's
later poetry and then proceed to withdraw their approbation because of
the direct and strong influence of Valery's Charmes on the Sonnets. Step
number two in the sophistical argument presents both Rilke and Valery
as "humanists" in the "narrower sense" of never transcending the realm
of the human in which their work begins and ends. (By "human" is here
meant the autonomy of the artist with rejection of an inclusive order and
a divine progenitor. "The artist himself, and he alone, is creator and
regulator: for a God there is no place, even less for a mediator. Both poets
are coldly opposed to the Christian tradition...."16) In step number three
the authors vacillate again because it now appears that Rilke was not a
humanist at all, in the sense that, like Valery, he participated in the full
extent of Western culture. A sense for this tradition including the Greeks
was entirely lacking in Rilke; his Bible consisted of the novels and stories
u Grete and Hans Heinrich Schaeder, Ein Weg zu T. S. Eliot (Hameln, 1948), p. 28.
u Ibid., pp. 18f.
252 THE GERMANIC REVIEW

of J. P. Jacobsen. 16 Not only is this grave distortion but it is almost comic

in ineptitude. One would surely have conceded to the Bible itself a fore­
most place in Rilke's formal development. The poet who wrote the fol­
lowing verses could hardly be entirely incognizant of the subtler values
of Greek civilization:
Erstaunte euch nicht auf attischen Stelen die Vorsicht
menschlicher Geste? war nicht Liebe und Abschied
so leicht auf die Schultern gelegt, als wär es aus anderm
Stoffe gemacht als bei uns? Gedenkt euch der Hände,
wie sie drucklos beruhen, obwohl in den Torsen die Kraft steht.
Diese Beherrschten wußten damit: so weit sind wir,
dieses ist unser, uns so zu berühren; stärker
stemmen die Götter uns an. Doch dies ist Sache der Götter.17

lt is nonsense to state that Rilke made no effort to attach himself to the

European tradition; he lived in it, absorbed it spontaneously all his life.
Such a proposition is comprehensible only if we accept as tradition ("by
great labor") the Jan'senist-Puritan "Pilgrim's Progress" from Aristotle
through Dante into the portals of the Anglican Church. 18 The choice is
between Rilke's aesthetic humanism and Eliot's Christian dogma (though
Rilke would hardly have seen any cogent necessity for such an exclusive
choice).
We are fortunate in having a magnificent illustration of just where these
two lines of development intersect for a moment in the two poets con­
cerned. We may not be far wrong in establishing this point of contact at
Baudelaire. For both Eliot and Rilke, Baudelaire comes to occupy an
exceedingly important place in their thinking. In dealing with Versfalls­
symptome Eliot in London and Rilke in Paris both testify eloquently to
the heritage of Baudelaire. The experience of the horrible and repulsive
assumes, in Rilke's case, the form of vicarious suffering terminating in an
aesthetic doctrine; in Eliot a kind of "obsession with putrefaction" which
is partly transcended in poetry, partly a cynical commentary.19 Eliot's
various essays, together with Rilke's Baudelaire poem and references in
private correspondence as weil as in the Rodin book, should be considered
together. What Eliot derives from Baudelaire is an idea "of salvation
from the ennui of modern life" through damnation, the capacity for damna­
tion; the satanic and diabolic of the fin de siecle spiritual climate is inter­
preted in orthodox fashion as a struggle for salvation.20 Even the Baude­
lairean poesie des departs is regarded as a flight in the direction of beatitude
11 Ibid.
17 Rilke, Werke, I, 251. (Unless otherwise indicated, the Rilke references are to
Augsewählte Werke, ed. Ernst Zinn, Vol. I.)
18 Curtius, op. cit., p. 346.
n Ibid., p. 312.
10 Eliot, "Baudelaire" in Selected Essays, pp. 343ff.
 RILKE AND ELIOT 253

and not of romantic escapism.21 On the other hand, one recalls Rilke's
spiritual companionship with Baudelaire during the first difficult Paris
years, the verses on Baudelaire's creative piety:
Das Schöne hat er unerhört bescheinigt,
Doch da er selbst noch feiert, was ihn peinigt,
hat er unendlich den Ruin gereinigt:
und auch noch das Vernichtende wird Welt .... 22

and, finally, the tribute to Baudelaire's factual expression ("sachliches

Sagen") which contributed, together with Cezanne, so largely to the forma­
tion of Rilke's New Poems. The latter occurs in a letter to Rilke's wife on
the subject of Baudelaire's "Une Charogne": "Artistic observation had
first to have prevailed upon itself far enough to see even in the horrible
and apparently repulsive that which is and which, with everything else
that is, is valid. The creator is no more allowed to discriminate than he is
to turn away from anything that exists: a single denial at any time will
force him out of the state of grace, make him utterly sinful."23 Both Eliot
and Rilke refer to the term "sin" in reference to Baudelaire, but Eliot
is concerned with its religious significance in the Christian strife between
Good and Evil, Rilke with its implications for the intuitionist poet ex­
ploring the maximum possibilities for poetic expression. Here are two
distinct developments of the heritage of Baudelaire in modern poetry.
Out of such a temperamental divergence a curious aftermath seems to
have evolved, according to E. R. Curtius, whose essay on Eliot from the
standpoint of a comprehensive European tradition is one of the best I
have read in any language on the subject. Since 1920, Eliot turned more
and more away from the unfulfilled pro:rnise of the postwar continent to a
critical revision of the English literary tradition (particularly from 1580
to 1780). This spiritual Anglicization ("geistige Anglisierung") implied,
at the same time, a certain de-Europeanization ("Ent-Europäisierung")
evidenced by the fact that, in the last thirty years, Eliot "has taken up
with only Maritain and Maurras: Thomism and Action Franr;aise. Noth­
ing at all from Spain and Germany."24 This is hardly a conception of
tradition flexible and tolerant enough to be acceptable outside the British
Isles and a few American universities. Eliot's anti-German bias has been
no secret. His judgment of Goethe that "he dabbled in both philosophy and
poetry and made no great success of either; his true role was that of the
man of the world and sage-a La Rochefoucauld, a La Bruyere, a Vauve­
narges, "25 can hardly be taken seriously. But it leads us to inquire, with
Curtius, whether Eliot intended thereby ex cathedra to demonstrate the
11 Ibid, p. 345. H Rilke, Späte Gedichte, p. 119.
21 Rilke, Letters, I, 314f. u Curtius, op. cit., p. 344.
211
Eliot, "Shelley and Keats" in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London:
Faber & Faber, 1933), p. 99.
254 THE GERMANIC REVIEW

fallibility of his own criticism.28 The matter of tradition, today more than
ever, becomes very grave in the light of such judgments. The lack of a
consistent German literary and critical tradition has always been the
Mte noire of Germanists themselves, but one wonders if the remedy lies,
as the Schaeders suggest, in turning drastically from Hölderlin-Nietzsche­
Rilke, or from Goethe with Eliot, to follow the latest gospel from across
the Channel. Familiarity with Eliot and his tradition has been too long
denied the Germans, but German criticism has unfortunately always been
susceptible to extremes, as in the eighteenth century in the age of Frederick
the Great.

II

More fruitful than waging unending war over conceptions of tradition

would be an analysis of some of the themes and motifs in the poetry of
Eliot and Rilke, as weil as of their conception of the nature of the poetic
language. Here a remarkable kinship comes to light. One of the most
conspicuous themes of this poetry is the time factor. Eliot's kaleidoscoping
of time in "Burnt Norton," for example, seems almost a commentary,
a musical variation of a persistent Rilkean theme:
Time present and time past
are both perhaps present in time future,
and time future contained in time past....
What might have been and what has been
point to one end, which is always present....'rl
A component of anxiety in The Book of Hours and Notebooks, the time
factor is mellowed down in Rilke's later years to an incredulous question:
Gibt es wirklich die Zeit, die zerstörende?
Wann, auf dem ruhenden Berg, zerbricht sie die Burg?
Dieses Herz, das unendlich den Göttern gehörende,
Wann vergewaltigts der Demiurg?

Sind wir wirklich so ängstlich Zerbrechliche,

Wie das Schicksal uns wahrmachen will?
Ist die Kindheit, die tiefe, versprechliche,
In den Wurzeln, später, still? ...28

Eliot writes in "Little Gidding": "The end is where we start from" and,
in fact, the Four Quartets opens and closes on the note of time, time em­
pirical and time eternal set off against one another: "This is the spring­
time/But not in time's covenant." In "Burnt Norton " we read:
11 Curtius, op. cit., p. 344. 17
Eliot, Four Quartets, p. 3.
11 Rilke, Werke, I, 315.
 RILKE AND ELIOT 255

Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,

Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always new....29
Let ua compare thia with a late Rilkean poem in which the relationahip of
future to preaent is expressed through nature metaphors:
Schon ist mein Blick am Hügel, dem besonnten,
dem Wege, den ich kaum begann, voran.
So faßt uns das, was wir nicht fassen konnten,
voller Erscheinung aus der Feme an-

Und wandelt uns, auch wenn wirs nicht erreichen,

in jenes, das wir, kaum es ahnend, sind;
ein Zeichen weht, erwidernd unserm Zeichen....
Wir aber spüren nur den Gegenwind.10
Here the unity of time, of course, servea quite different purposes in Eliot
and Rilke. With Eliot its dialectics operate on various levels: literal,
moral, and mystical.81 There is no moral aspect of time in Rilke's usage.
Time, for Rilke, was always an element of destiny, "Schicksal" and "Ge­
genüber"; time is overcome by imaginative space ("Weltinnenraum").
The concept of time is further developed by both poets in relation to
childhood. As a constant focus in Rilke's life and work this latter theme
needs no further expansion. The main themes of Four Quartets in which,
on the one hand, the psychic tensions of a secular culture are appeased
through religioua discipline while, on the other, a poetic basia ia supplied
for a theory of poetry, are bracketed within the childhood reference. The
work begins and ends with the childrens' voicea emanating from the rose
garden:
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
cannot bear very much reality....12

A kind of reality that is at one with our pre-statea of unified conaciousness

is the burden of the Twenty-first Sonnet to Orpheus (1):
Frühling ist wiedergekommen. Die Erde
ist wie ein Kind, das Gedichte weiß;
viele, o viele....Für die Beschwerde
langen Lernens bekommt sie den Preis ....33
n Eliot, Four Quartets, p. 7. 10 Rilke, Späte Gedichte, p. 123.

11 Helen Gardner, The Art of T. S. Eliot (London: Cresset Press, 1949), pp. 158ff.
11 Eliot, p. 4. 11 Rilke, p. 294.
256 THE GERMANIC REVIEW

In both instances a descriptive treatment of the state of childhood is

avoided for a functional one in which the innocence and cohesion of pre­
existential childhood (in Hofmannsthal's sense) are evoked through the
language process itself.
I am not so much concerned here with how these two poets resolved
their problems in individual ways as with what compulsions are at the
root of their problems, and our own, which made them seek these pa.r­
ticular solutions. The great theme weaving through Eliot's and Rilke's
work is the inadequacy of modern attempts at love. The theme of love as
failure occupies a cardinal place in Eliot's work, from the pure animal act
of copulation, as with the carbuncular young man and the typist in The
Waste Land, to the implications of sexual impotence in The Holww Men.
Void of the possibility of genuine communion, of spiritual giving, such
relationships become basically symptomatic of man's deracination and
exile in the modern community (the rent,ed, room of Gerontion has, inci­
dentally, its numerous parallels in Rilke):
The time of the coupling of man and woman
and that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking.Dung and Death. ["East Coker"]M
Eliot's solution is couched in the mystical metaphors of St. John of the
Cross, "The Ascent of Mount Carmel," and the way of dispossession.
Rilke's persistent dwelling on the love theme is well-known, from its
prose formulation in Malte Laurids Brigge to the Second Duino Elegy
where the possibility of spiritual communion in love is wistfully written
off:
Liebende, euch, ihr ineinander genügten,
frag ich nach uns. Ihr greift euch. Habt ihr Beweise? ...
...Und doch, wenn ihr der ersten
Blicke Schrecken besteht und die Sehnsucht am Fenster,
und den ersten gemeinsamen Gang, ein Mal durch den Garten:
Liebende, seid ihrs dann noch? ...35
There are further interesting parallels on the love theme in Malte Laurids
Brigge and Eliot's Family Reunion. Rilke had always insisted (even in the
earlier Worpswede period) on what one of Eliot's characters in the play ex­
presses in regard to the general opinion that "one ought to be happy"
("and, for that matter," writes Rilke to Emanuel Bodman from Wester­
wede, "it really is not at all important to be happy, whether single or
married").36 A recent English critic's interpretation of Harry's sense of
guilt in Family Reunion closely follows Malte's Prodigal Son theme:
"Mary's 'ordinary hopelessness' and his [Harry's] wife's wretchedness are
u Eliot, p. 12. 11 Rilke, p. 250.
18 Rilke Letters, I 57.
, ,
 RILKE AND ELIOT 257

fruits of this sin, his parents' and his own, the sin of failure in loving. He
has to learn to love. He must go away into solitude and silence, like the
scapegoat, laden with sin, driven out into the wilderness, so that years
later, or months .. . he may find what ways of love are possible for him."37
Instead of meeting the inadequacy of the love situation with Eliot's
religious abstinence and renunciation, Rilke tends more and more, towards
the end of his life, to an ambivalent standpoint, never quite clear or satis­
factory: on the higher spiritual plane the abandonment of the object of
love, in Abelone's sense of love as a direction and not a goal; on the physi­
cal plane a sort of phallus worship, as outlined in the Worker's Letter and
the correspondence of the later years.38 The premises upon which such
views are based are entirely opposed to Eliot's.
Sexual love and death-Eros and Thanatos-are the poles about which
the themes of modern poetry are grouped in the heartbreaking struggle
between secularism and Christian traditionalism. Probably Rilke's great­
est ideological contribution to modern thought is the idea of the individual
death, to which we find nothing comparable in Eliot. Yet concern with
the death theme is everywhere evident in Eliot, though somewhat diffi.­
cult to disentangle from its secular manifestations, on the one hand, as in
The W aste Land ("I had not thought death had undone so many"-the
equivalent of "the little death" of the Book of Hours and of Madame
Lamort's cheap millinery in the Fifth Elegy); and, again, from its theo­
logical interpretations and implications in the Quartels. The basic theme
in The Waste Land is death-in-life, as it was in portions of Malte Laurids
Brigge and in ironical sections of the Elegies. To much of Rilke's poetry
one might apply Cleanth Brooks's contention that The Waste Land is built
on a major contrast "between two kinds of life and two kinds of death."39
Ultimately, for both Rilke and Eliot, death and life are no longer opposites,
the old distinctions fall, and if it is possible to call the last section of The
Waste Land a "journey in the Beyond" where "Psyche wanders in un­
earthly realms," who does not feel himself immediately transported to
the Tenth Duino Elegy with its "Berge des Urleids" and "weite Land­
schaft der Klagen"?
The "Gräberlandschaft" in both Eliot's and Rilke's poetry, as well as a
host of other themes and motifs, would call for much more ample treat­
ment than the limitations of this paper provide. For one thing, in view
of their dramatic kind of poetry, one might profitably investigate their
respective interests in the theater. Another worthwhile subject would be an
analysis of their attitudes towards music in poetry and the part played
by the auditory imagination in their work. A very interesting analysis
rr Gardner, op. cit., p. 154.
18 Rilke, Werke, II, 305 ff. and letter to Bodman (Briefe aus Muzot), pp. 140 ff.
H Cleanth Brooks, "The Waste Land: An Analysis" in T. S. Eliot: A Study of his
Writings by Several Hands (London, 1949), p. 8.
258 THE GERMANIC REVIEW

might be made of the use of cosmic (stellar) imagery in their late poetry.
Writing of the young Eliot's introduction into criticism of the concept
"pattern," Holthusen continues: "Just as Rilke, in the confusion of earthly
destinies is always in search of the 'figure,' in which the temporal finds
permanence and transparency; and just as he searches the heavens for
planets corresponding to the characters of earthly living ('Sieh den Him­
mel. Heißt kein Sternbild Reiter?'), so Eliot is searching in all historical
expression the objective, supra-historical pattern."40 The "Gestirnhafte"
in Rilke's later poetry, derived in part from Hölderlin, does indeed find
its equivalent in Eliot's boarhound and boar that
Pursue their patt,ern as before
But reconciled among the stars.41

One other matter, and not the least important, must detain us a little
longer. In the matter of poetic practice and the poetic view of the creative
process hardly two other modern poets, to my knowledge, have written
so extensively on the subject and approximated each other so closely in
the definition of the poetic emotion and how it is actually handled in the
writing of poetry. The wcus classicus on the impersonality of the emotion
of art appears in Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent": "The
business of the poet is not to find new emotions but to use the ordinary
ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are
not in actual emotions at all .... Poetry is not a turning loose of emo­
tion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality,
but an escape from personality."'2 In this connection two Rilke passages
come instantly to mind, the one from the Kalkreuth Requiem ("0 alter
Fluch der Dichter/ die sich beklagen, wo sie sagen sollten") and the other
familiar passage from MaUe Lauri,ds Brigge ("Ach, aber mit Versen ist
so wenig getan, wenn man sie früh schreibt ...").
We are concerned here with the poet's language. The gains of modern
poetry have consisted chiefly in clearing the marginal lands of language
and in pushing back word-boundaries to admit the full complexity of
modern experience. The modern poet's agony is that his explorations of
the word, much more tortuous and complex than Faust's related effort in
his medieval study, are conative, potential, and never quite realized.They
leave him instead with Eliot's "intolerable wrestle with words and mean­
ings" where
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
and found e.nd lost age.in: and now,
under conditions that seem unpropitious......,
40 Holthusen, op. cit., p. 72. '1 Eliot, Four Quartet8, p. 5.
42
Eliot, Sacred Wood, p. 58. 41 Eliot, Four Quartets, p. 17.
 RILKE AND ELIOT 259

One of the favorite word.s in Eliot's aesthetic is the word "precision" and
his conception of the practitioner of poetry is viewed from the standpoint
of the craftsman, what Curtius calls "the artistic conception of poetry."
One thinks of Rilke's repeated insistence on this point, and its application
not only in his prose but in the very structure and titles of his poems
("The Gold.smith," "The Potter on the Nile," "The Roman Ropemaker,"
etc.). Eliot's classic demand for an "objective correlative" ("Hamlet and
His Problems") is anticipated much more humanly, and less pedantically,
in a curious Rilke letter written a few months before his death.The corre­
spondent is warned against subjectivism in case he is absolutely unable to
abandon the writing of poetry."But if you should find a pen in your hand
nevertheless," writes Rilke: "forbid it to write down 'emotionalisms,'
oblige it to note facts of your own and preferably of more remote life, and,
in any case, provide for yourself, besides the pen that is destined to convey
to friend.s a sign of your welfare and activity, a second pen that you handle
like a tool: and do not let yourself be moved by what proceeds from this
second pen, be hard towards the least of your productions.What you have
put out as a craftsman, to which this other pen gives contour, should react
no further on your own life, should be a shaping, a transposition, a trans­
formation, to which your 'ego' was only the first and last impetus....""
My only reason for referring, in conclusion, to the anecdotes of Rilke's
researches in Grimm's dictionary and of Hans Carossa's amazement when
Rilke spoke to him "of the plant-growths of language as humbly as Ce­
zanne might have spoken of the process of painting," is that they so
exactly convey what Eliot once wrote to the effect that "Whatever words
a writer employs, he benefits by knowing as much as possible of the history
of those words, of the uses to which they have already been applied."45
In their book the Schaeders remark that, owing to the very special cir­
cumstances of German civilization in the twenties, no visible path led from
poets like Hofmannsthal and Schröder, George and Rilke to Eliot's world of
expression.46 Perhaps today, where the circumstances are of a different
kind, it may be more possible for English as well as German critics to
examine further those "affinity systems" that Curtius represents as form­
ing the articulation of the spiritual world.
University of Minnesota
"Rilke, Letters, II, 390.
41 Eliot, quoted in Matthiessen, op. cit., p. 83.
41 Schaeder, op. cit., p. 12.