‘Torso of An Archaic Apollo’ (1908) By Rainer Maria Rilke

A metamodern poet?

“For the true poet the metaphor is not a rhetorical figure but a representative image that really hovers before him in place of a concept. For him, the character is not a whole laboriously assembled from individual traits, but a person, insistently living before his eyes, distinguished from the otherwise identical vision of the painter by his continuous life and action.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry — plus a single novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge), and a stunningly incisive collection of ten letters published posthumously Letters to a Young Poet (Briefe an einen jungen Dichter) — span the late 19th and early 20th centuries, bridging the gap between the traditional Romantic era and the rising tide of Modernism that I have touched on in previous articles.

Rilke (1875 –1926) explored themes of love, loss, faith, and the nature of existence, often using evocative imagery and symbolism. His exploration of inwardness, focus on subjective experience, and experimentation with form and language created the aesthetic episteme for many aspects of Modernist poetry to flourish and develop.