Book 1, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke : Chapter 5, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge Summary

These excerpts are from 1910. Each one has been written in prose, rather than as poetry. This is rather unusual but not unprecedented in the modern history of poets. The first piece of writing is titled "For the Sake of a Single Poem," and is about poetry. He writes of how the poems written in one's youth lack some of the vigor of the kinds of works that can be written from the more mature perspective. The second piece about faces is called "Faces." Like the preceding ones, it is most of one page long. It refers to rapidly shifting facial expressions, and about how even vast numbers of things often only appear to be infinite...