Life of the Hero.

NATIONALISM; EASTER; BOOKS -- Reviews; BEGGING; SPIRITUALITY; CONDUCT of life

The article discusses about the book "Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke." For Rilke it was a long grim Lent, from the Ash Wednesday of "Make Laurids Brigge" to the Easter of the "Duino Elegies" and the "Sonnets to Orpheus." A dozen years, more or less; a dozen years of wandering, mendicancy, solitude, and self-distrust. Rilke seems for a short while to have accepted the war as a good thing, not in a vulgar national, chauvinistic manner, but as a great spiritual experience, sweeping the ego out of itself, and when this mood wore off, as it did of course quickly, it is as if thereafter the war, almost like a strict Verse form, by imposing limitations, excluding excursions, compelling compliances, forced the artist to triumph over the scheme: so that when Muzot was offered he came there prepared.