In Week 6 of our class, our main focus will be on the Rainer Maria Rilke, shifting to an author who not only had a major influence within his own medium of poetry and literature, but who moved within the world of the fine arts. After living in an artists colony, he married the sculptor and painter Clara Westhoff. He then relocated to Paris to write about Auguste Rodin, and ended up working closely with the artist for several years as his secretary. Rilke is thus a figure conversant with a wide range of the culture of his times, ranging from philosophy and the other humanities (which he studied as a student), to the fine arts and music, to his own chosen medium of poetry, literature, and letters.  

Rilke's poetry, well worth reading and reflecting upon for its own sake, has been incredibly influential on 20th and 21st century writing, including on other Existentialists. Martin Heidegger, for example, discusses Rilke's poetry, particularly in relation to the theme of death. Gabriel Marcel composed music inspired by some of Rilke's poems, which he set to those compositions.  The Letters to a Young Poet has also been incredibly influential, and not only in relation to Existentialism or even literature and art more generally - one example of a work that adopts that same approach would be Daniel Boulud's Letters to a Young Chef. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is also noteworthy for inspiring a later, and also very important Existentialist novel, Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea.

We will be discussing the following texts (which you'll find in the module "PDFs of Course Texts")

• Letters To A Young Poet
• Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (supplemental)

Some of the key ideas we will be examining together are

• The individuality of the human person
• The Solitude required for human development
• The dangers of social and cultural Conventions
• The meanings of Death for human beings
• The relationship between art, creativity, and life
• Love, gender, and sexuality
• The mysterious nature of existence and of Things
• The nature of God and religion