Rilke on Preuschen (1896)
On 24 September 1896, the twenty-year-old Rainer Maria Rilke reviewed Preuschen in the Prague Deutsches Abendblatt. It is a striking early statement of the poem-as-picture idea that would preoccupy him for life — and evidence that one of the century’s great poets took her seriously:
In H. von Preuschen, poetry and painting live together like sisters. They meet in the realm of mood. She paints her magnificent poems — their heavy flow of rhymeless rhythm streams like melted gold — and she composes her colorful allegories on the canvas. In her latest book one can find the text to her great paintings. … In front of these images, one asks oneself: is the poem a picture or the picture a poem?
The review is reprinted in Rilke’s collected early criticism, Bücher · Theater · Kunst (pp. 82–85), and in the Sämtliche Werke (V: 310). The English is from Carsten Strathausen, The Look of Things: Poetry and Vision around 1900 (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2003), pp. 212–213.