Poetry Daily Prose Feature - Adam Zagajewski: "Rereading Rilke"

Poetry Daily Prose Feature - Adam Zagajewski: "Rereading Rilke"
Excerpt:
The wise princess, who admired the poet but also knew well his weaknesses, liked to address Rilke in her letters and otherwise as Dottore Serafico—what a lovely, ironic sobriquet! How good for us, his readers, that he escaped the dungeons of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, some kind of modern evil that manifested itself in World War I and flourished in the following decades in many areas of our planet never made inroads into Rilke's poetic meditation. This is our loss. We've learned that to understand the nature of modern evil is an utterly difficult thing, perhaps impossible; having Rilke among the researchers working in this particular artistic laboratory would have been of inestimable value. For me, the happy owner of the elegant slim book bought long ago, the Elegies represented just the beginning of a long road leading to a better acquaintance with Rilke's entire oeuvre. The fiery invocation that starts "The First Elegy"—once again: "who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angels' / Orders? And even if one of them pressed me / suddenly to his heart: I'd be consumed / in his more potent being. For beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure"—had become for me a living proof that poetry hadn't lost its bewitching powers. At this early stage I didn't know Czeslaw Milosz's poetry; it was successfully banned by the Communist state from the schools, libraries, and bookstores—and from me...
Rozewicz's poems were born out of the ashes of the other war, World War II, and were themselves like a city of ashes. Rozewicz avoided metaphors in his poetry, considering any surplus of imagination an insult to the memory of the last war victims, a threat to the moral veracity of his poems; they were supposed to be quasi-reports from the great catastrophe. His early poems, written before Adorno uttered his famous dictum that after Auschwitz poetry's competence was limited—literally, he said, "It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz"—were already imbued with the spirit of limitation and caution. I admired the spartan sparseness of Rozewicz's language then, and for some time I did agree that poetry definitely must be tame, metaphorless, prosy, since history had delivered it such a deadly blow....
Listen to great poets only; sometimes a Catullus can save you from a literary dictatorship of somebody who lives only five blocks away. And then perhaps you will see that under some circumstances the Zeitgeist may turn out to be no more convincing intellectually than a vulgar poltergeist. These were the happy beginnings of my long acquaintance with Rilke's poetry. Later I also delighted in reading his prose:
...I also read with pleasure and profit Rilke's book on Rodin. Every young artist should read it: this beautiful praise of discipline exerts a stimulating effect on younger minds who may tend to overrate the irrational, purely inspirational ingredient of artistry. Even later I discovered the ocean of Rilke's letters.
...His poetry is almost always high-strung; in a way it represents the essence of poetry in the purity of its lyric song. Rilke's oeuvre, especially in his last years, is also characterized by a certain "passivity"; this is a poetry that receives, that listens to, that waits for a signal coming from the outside...