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Rilke letters5/28/2023 ![]() In the spring of 1891, with his father’s reluctant permission, Rilke left that “abyss of undeserved misery,” where he had endured physical and spiritual abuse he barely survived. (Cue philosopher Amelie Rorty on the relationship between character and social context.) Young Rilke at the Sankt-Pölten military academy At age eleven, just as his artistic talent was coming abloom, he was immersed into a radically ill-fitted environment where he was subjected to constant contempt and occasional cruelty by his peers and even his teachers, who saw his romantic soul and sentimental spirit as a weakness in the military context. ![]() He had been sent there by his parents - a traditionalist father who had become a railway officer after a failed military career and a pious, narcissistic, fundamentalist mother. ![]() ![]() Perhaps because the experience stood in such stark contrast with the profound sensitivity from which Rilke’s genius sprang, the five years he spent at a military academy as a boy were both tremendously traumatic and deeply formative for him. His Letters to a Young Poet remains one of the most psychologically insightful, philosophically lucid, and perennially elevating texts humanity has produced. ![]() Rainer Maria Rilke (December 4, 1875–December 29, 1926) was not only a writer of remarkable poetic potency, but also an astute observer of the psyche and a tireless champion of our capacity for transcendence. ![]()
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