Leben und Lieder. Bilder und Tagebuchblatter von Rene Maria Rilke (Life and Songs. Pictures and Pages from a Journal by Rene Maria Rilke)

Strassburg & Leipzig: G. K. Kattentidt, Jung Deutschlands Verlag, (1894). First edition of Rilke's extremely rare first book, one of only seven copies known to be extant. Published when Rilke was eighteen, Leben und Lieder was "blatantly sentimental, at once simplistic and unmannered, but it nonetheless developed some of the major issues that moved him. Many of its poems were, of course, manufactured to serve his career, but others were deeply felt. Amateurish as they were, they expose a young poet's nerves as he tried to recreate the old conflicts between his parents or to reflect his desire for an image of himself as an artist conscious of his place in his time. Yet they were appallingly sentimental, immature, considering (Rilke's) aim to achieve instant recognition and approval." "Rilke rejected these poems before they were published.... It was important for the poet to see his book in print despite his misgivings. Yet it was partly this need that led him to single it out for utter extinction not too much later. He never allowed it to appear in any of his collected works...." Rilke's dismissal of his first book, in fact, may have had less to do with embarrassment at its meager literary merits than with remorse at the circumstances surrounding its publication. When his "own family refused to contribute to Kattentidt's offer to publish the book with a subvention", Valerie von David-Rhonfeld, Rilke's fiancee, "remained his only resource. She gave him her Christmas money, her monthly allowance, and her grandmother's old lace as well as brooches she had inherited. His initial gratitude turned into a burden even before it became time for him to leave (her)." - Ralph Freedman, Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke (N. Y.: Farrar Strauss & Giroux, 1996), pp. 29-31. As Michael Bernstein remarks in his recent Five Portraits, however: "Great poets never entirely abandon the impulses and perceptions that prompted their first compositions. No matter how they may distance themselves from the language in which they originally formulated them, and irrespective of the immensely greater technical skill with which they learn to express themselves, the original intuitions are simply too much a part of any poet's makeup to be left behind." Comparisons are invidious, of course, but by way of providing some measure of the true rarity of Rilke's Leben und Lieder: Yeats' first book, Mosada (1886), is considered to be a very rare book, yet nine copies have appeared at auction since 1983. No copy of Leben und Lieder is recorded during the same period; one suspects that plumbing the depths of the auction records for the last century would produce a similar result. A very fine copy of one of the rarest of literary debuts. 8vo, original pale blue printed wrappers. A very fine copy of one of the rarest of literary debuts.