Abstract

The term ‘aesthetics’ consists of the philosophical study of a system that appeals to the senses. It deals not only with the nature and the value of the Arts, but also with those responses to natural objects that find expression in the language of the beautiful and the ugly. Rainer Maria Rilke was one of the leading poets and philosophers of European modernism. Rilke was embedded with German aesthetics since his childhood. This paper addresses the relationship between Rilke’s poetry and the visual arts, which involves an intimate transference of aesthetic means and definitions of the form in the creative process of writing. Rilke’s connection with Auguste Rodin made him learn that a person who can ‘see’ things, could realize the beauty of a ‘thing’ and could, subsequently, write. To ‘see’ the ‘thing’ or ‘object’ rather than representing emotion was considered as more important by Rodin and that was the way he cracked the old aesthetic mould. It will also look at how Rilke created own poetics against the background of German aesthetic tradition. Rilke admitted to the constant reference to the Bible, the books of the Danish poet Jens Peter Jacobsen and Auguste Rodin, who all had given him the experience of the essence of creativity, its depths and eternity. Rilke’s association with philosophers, such as Nietzsche, and artists, starting from Worpweders and Rodin to Cezanne’s paintings, made him almost an ap­prentice in visual art.