The Beginning of Terror: A Psychological Study of Rainer Maria Rilke's Life and Work

The insights here are of such depth, and contain such beauty in them, that time and again the reader must pause for breath. At last Rilke has met a critic whose insight, courage, and humanity are worthy of his life and work."
—Leslie Epstein Director, Graduate Creative Writing Program, Boston University
"[A] well-reasoned, fairly fascinating, and illuminating study which soundly and convincingly applies Freudian and particularly post-Freudian insights into the self, to Rilke's life and work, in a way which enlightens us considerably as to the relationship between life and work in original ways. Kleinbard takes off where Hugo Simenauer's monumental psycho- biography of Rilke (1953) left off. . . . He succeeds in giving us a psychic portrait of the poet which is more illuminating and which . . . does greater justice to its subject than any of his predecessors.. . . . Any reader with strong interest in Rilke would certainly welcome the availability of this study."
—Walter H. Sokel,Commonwealth Professor of German and English Literatures,University of Virginia.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are just able to bear, and we wonder at it so because it calmly disdainsto destroy us."
—Rilke
Beginning with Rilke's 1910 novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,

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