You Must Change Your Life by Rachel Corbett

Description

Rilke’s life — and the making of a mystic. You Must Change Your Life — Rachel Corbett’s acclaimed biography — takes its title from Rilke’s most famous line (the closing of “Archaic Torso of Apollo”) and traces how Rainer Maria Rilke became the twentieth century’s poet of inwardness: the most beloved spiritual poet of the modern age.

From the Duino Elegies — begun in a castle on the Adriatic, completed a decade later in a Swiss sanatorium — to the Sonnets to Orpheus written in a three-week frenzy, Corbett follows Rilke through the great loves, the restless wanderings, the famous Letters to a Young Poet — showing how a lonely, searching, often difficult man forged some of the most consoling poems ever written out of his own unhealed wounds.

Lyrical and insightful, this is the Rilke biography for readers who love the poems — and want to understand the restless life that made them possible.

What can one artist teach another? In 1902, a broke 26-year-old poet arrived in Paris to write about the most famous sculptor in the world — and ended up becoming his secretary. You Must Change Your Life, Rachel Corbett’s Marfield Prize-winning biography, tells the story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin: a friendship that remade modern poetry.

Rilke came to Paris to write a monograph on Rodin and stayed to learn at his feet. The sculptor taught the poet to truly see — famously sending him to the Jardin des Plantes to study animals until he could capture them in words — and the discipline transformed Rilke’s verse. Out of those Paris years came the Ding-Gedichte, the ‘thing poems’ of the New Poems, crowned by ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo,’ whose closing line gives this book its title: ‘You must change your life.’

What the biography reveals:

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• How a young, unknown Rilke won a place beside the celebrated Rodin
• The lessons in looking that turned a romantic versifier into a modern master
• The Paris art world of 1902–1906 — and the famous circle around both men
• Why the friendship fractured, and what survived it

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Transporting readers to early twentieth-century Paris, Corbett’s vibrant portrait shows how genius is not born but made — sometimes by another genius standing nearby.