LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET

Rilke was certainly influenced by him, probably for the good,
in his twenties, and speaks of Dehmel’s name as a “hard and
significant’ one for his own artistic development. Deliverances,
But Love, Woman and World are three revealing titles of his books
of lyrics, and he wrote a novel in lyrical form and several dramas
and pantomimes. His themes are erotic, social and purely lyrical,
the first being on the whole the most tasteless, the second the
most sincere, and the third the most artistically successful. He
was keenly concerned with sexual social problems, and at one
time was drawn into the literary orbit of Dostoevsky and the
cult of the holy whore. In the European War he volunteered
for the German army at the age of over fifty, and a contemporary
photograph of him shews a fierce, proud-nostrilled face with
eyes gleaming balefully from beneath his Pickelhaube—a perfect
type of what Coleridge called Teutonic nimiety.

NOTE 10, PAGE 20

Rilke had returned to Paris, after his month in Italy, with his
health scarcely improved. He decided to spend the whole summer
of 1903 recuperating in Germany, at Worpswede and Ober-
neuland near by; and this time Clara accompanied him. A
remarkable letter which he wrote shortly after his arrival at
Worpswede (much of it was later lifted bodily into the pages
of Malte Laurids Brigge) shewed that he had not yet come to
terms with his dread of great cities. “The carriages drove right
through me, and hurrying people did not swerve aside for me
and ran over me full of contempt, as over a bad place in which
stale water has collected. . . . O what a world it is ! Pieces, pieces
of people, parts of animals, remains of finished things, and every-
thing still on the move, driving about as if in an uncanny wind,
carried and carrying, falling and catching themselves up in their
fall”” (Letters 1902-1906, pp. 98-9).

NoOTE 11, PAGE 21

“Omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt”—Spinoza,
the philosopher of poets from Lessing, Goethe, Coleridge,
Wordsworth and Shelley onwards.

D* ST

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UNIVERSITY OF (LLINGIS