Visit M. Allen Cunningham's blog "Dispatches" to read the new in-depth interview in which he discusses Lost Son, Rainer Maria Rilke, Lou Andreas-Salome, Clara Westhoff, Auguste Rodin and Paula Modersohn-Becker.

Excerpt:

Can you give your take on the aesthetic that Rilke was studying with Lou and took for himself, the "thing form," the ding-gedicht? Is that akin to what his contemporary, the great American poet William Carlos Williams, said: "No ideas but in things?"

Absolutely, and I think there's also a parallel in T. S. Eliot's idea of the objective correlative, of tying, somehow using an object or a thing to express the secrets of our own inner selves, all of our unfathomable conflicted feelings and emotions. Somehow when you focus your artistic attention on a "thing" and seek to create it as wholly as possible through some artistic discipline, in Rilke's case, poetry, just by looking at a thing and rendering it, you can plumb pretty deeply a lot of human mysteries.

Right, you generate the higher idea.

Yes, so its not so much about explicitly exploring an emotion on a page as it is about exploring a thing and seeing what that draws out in him. That's another thing that I love about Rilke! His sense of living in this world that is just teeming with things. As human beings it's all we have, really. We are these souls walking around in a world of objects and things and so how can we not have an incredibly intimate relationship to those things and how can they not tell us a great deal about ourselves.

Visit Cunningham's blog..