The Only Song We Have - Hardcover
In The Only Song We Have, Lawrence Kessenich offers an intimate portrait of the relationship between the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke and the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. The storyline, as the author shapes it, follows biographical details closely, exploring how these two artists viewed creativity as essential to human life – and art as a vocation demanding one’s complete attention. Kessenich shapes the story around Rodin’s conviction that “all the world is raw material,” suggesting how the sculptor influenced Rilke’s notion of poetry as a way of “seeing” that requires both patience and persistence.
The author examines Rodin’s insistence on finding “beauty” in the midst of the imperfections of life, a viewpoint that influenced Rilke’s conviction that “you must change your life” – measured not in moral terms but as a perspective broad enough to embrace the flawed, the incomplete, and the ugly. Kessenich offers an intriguing conjecture, in the novella’s final sections, on what led to the rupture between the two, highlighting a conviction the sculptor and poet shared that “work” took precedence over one’s personal life.
Kessenich’s story will be a welcome invitation, particularly for those unacquainted with the story of these men and their relationship, probing the complexities each embraced in shaping their lives as artists. The story also invites us to deepen our view of what creative work is about and why it matters in a world where, as Rilke put it later in his life, “beauty is nothing / but the beginning of a terror we can just endure, / and we marvel at it precisely for the way it calmly spurns / to destroy us.” Much is at stake in artistic work, as Kessenich invites us to say in this intimate portrait of Rilke and Rodin.
- Mark S. Burrows, PhD, author most recently of You Are the Future: Living the Questions with Rainer Maria Rilke (2024) and a new translation of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (2024).