Word: leppmann
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Dates: during 1984-1984
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...Wolfgang Leppmann...
...Wolfgang Leppmann has written the kind of biography such cases require: a solid rather than brilliant account of the off-duty Rilke, who was an odd but resilient product of the late 19th century. Born in Prague in 1875, Rilke spent the first seven years wearing dresses and long golden curls to satisfy his mother, still mourning the death in infancy of her first child. Impersonating his dead sister was the last role anybody ever imposed upon Rilke. At the age of ten he entered a military academy near Vienna. "Seize your sword," he wrote in a schoolboy poem. "Perish...
...Leppmann, a literary historian and critic, is particularly adept at placing Rilke in his constricting time (circa 1900) and suffocating place (Habsburg Vienna). Given these obstacles, plus the additional one of a neurotic mama, no other modern poet grew more-or had further to grow. His early poems were distinguished principally for their alliteration and easy sentimentality, and his early manhood remarkable mainly for its seductions...
...daughter, a distant second to art. He preferred to live alone, in second-rate hotel rooms, mostly in Paris. "I am learning to see" became his description of the writing process. He composed poems of close, naturalistic observation, as if the poet's function were, in Leppmann's words, to act as a "recording instrument...
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