Online Zoom Forum: Rainer Maria Rilke: The Spiritual, Social, and Artistic Vision and Influence of His Life and Work.
Date: Wednesday 18 February 2026.
Time: 7pm-9pm (UK time).
Event Description:
Format: There will be five talks, each of 12 minutes, followed by discussion among the speakers and the chair, followed by Q & A.
Chair:
Simon Barrow:
Bio: Simon Barrow is a writer, commentator, poet, educator and researcher with wide experience in politics, public issues, media, organisational change, ethics and religion/beliefs. He was director of the think-tank Ekklesia from 2005-2024. Before that he worked in media and adult theological education. From 2000-2005 he was assistant general secretary of Churches Together in Britain and Ireland. His latest book is Beyond Our Means: Poetry, Prose and Blue Runes (Siglum, 2025) and will be followed by Against the Religion of Power: Telling a Different Christian Story (Ekklesia Publishing, April 2026). He also writes for the Edinburgh Music Review.
Speakers:
Martyn Crucefix:
Title: Rilke's Poetry: From Prayer, and Heart-work, to Praise.
Description: An overview of the development of Rilke's poems from 1899 to 1926, highlighting the shifts in his practice and his experiments with form, from the unorthodox spirituality of The Book of Hours to the challenges of the Duino Elegies and the neglected French poems of his final years, which celebrate time, the seasons and the natural world.
Bio: Martyn Crucefix is a British poet and translator. He is the author of eight original collections of poetry, most recently Between a Drowning Man (Salt, 2023) and Walking Away (Dare-Gale Press, 2025). Martyn has received an Eric Gregory award, a Hawthornden Fellowship, and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for his translations (from the German) of the poems of Peter Huchel. His translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (Enitharmon, 2006) was shortlisted for the Popescu Prize for Poetry Translation. His translation of essays by German poet and novelist, Lutz Seiler, In Case of Loss, is published by And Other Stories and a major Rilke Selected Poems, Change Your Life, is published by Pushkin Press (2024). A new translation of Jurgen Becker’s 1993 collection, Foxtrot at the Erfurt Stadium due from Shearsman, 2026. Blog and website at http://www.martyncrucefix.com
https://martyncrucefix.com/selected-poems-of-rainer-maria-rilke-2024/
Prof Susan McCabe:
Title: The 'Spiritual Realism' of Rainer Maria Rilke and H.D..
Description: I will explore how these two poets enact a form of “self-help,” or “self-other-help.” I show how their works echo each other across poems, especially through Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (1922) and H.D.’s Trilogy (1944-1946). These poets provide methods of incantation, invocation, breathing, and identification to enact both “how to suffer” and to create ecstatic experience. They had to face mortality close up and spend long periods alone that allowed them to exercise their “antennae" gateway to the invisible; Both explore their link to the spiritual and to the earth through what is now considered its own field, eco-poetics.
Bio: Susan McCabe was born on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, has taught in Oregon and Arizona, and received her PhD at UCLA. She also taught and conducted research in her mother’s country of Sweden. She teaches at the University of Southern California. She directed the PhD in Literature and Creative Writing Program at USC (2006-2009). She is the author of six books, including two critical studies—Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss (Penn State University Press, 1994) and Cinematic Modernism: Modern Poetry and Film (Cambridge University Press, 2005)—and two poetry volumes, Swirl (Red Hen Press, 2003), and Descartes’ Nightmare (winner of the Agha Shahid Ali prize and published by Utah University Press). She is also the author of a dual biography of modernist poet and writer pair, An Untold Love Story: H.D. & Bryher (Oxford 2021). Most recently, McCabe’s new poetry book, I Woke A Lake (2025), has been published by The Center for Literary Publishing (CLP) at Colorado State University (CSU).
Dr Nicholas Reynolds:
Title: The Excess of Experience and Poetic Mediation in Early Rilke.
Description: This talk, drawn from my forthcoming book Rilke’s Early Poetry –: Visions and Echoes, argues that Rilke’s early poetry is centrally concerned with the conditions under which intense experience becomes bearable. In The Book of Hours, The Book of Images, and the Eleven Visions (Visions of Christ), Rilke builds poetic forms, like prayer, image, gesture, and a consciously constructed voice, that function as a “bulwark”: a protective structure that both shelters the self and opens a framed relation to what would otherwise overwhelm it. These poems do not simply promise transcendence; they repeatedly return spiritual experience to the Diesseits, to embodied perception, address, and a renewed relation to things and others. Read this way, the early Rilke offers a practical poetics of attention: a discipline of seeing and saying that resists possession, premature interpretation, and quietist withdrawal.
Bio: Nicholas Reynolds is Assistant Professor of German at Trinity University in San Antonio, where he teaches German language and literature alongside courses in philosophy and international studies. He regularly teaches in Berlin through Trinity’s summer program. He is the author of Sense and Creative Labor in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Prose Works (Palgrave, 2021) and is completing Visions and Echoes: Rilke’s Early Poetry (Bloomsbury). His scholarship centers on Rainer Maria Rilke, German modernism and Romanticism, with a particular interest in experiences that call poetry into being and in how poetic language mediates intense, spiritual, and ethically charged encounters with the world.
Prof Richard Shusterman:
Title: Rilke on the Art of Living: Poetry, Love, and Gender.
Description: Drawing on my research background as a professional philosopher, my talk relates Rilke’s work to the ancient idea of philosophy as an art of living focused on self-knowledge and self-cultivation. After briefly explaining this tradition, I show how Rilke exemplifies this idea in an alternative mode through poetry, love, and the transcending of rigid, constricting gender identities. The talk focuses on Rilke’s famous poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” and his Letters to a Young Poet.
Bio: Educated at Jerusalem and Oxford, Richard Shusterman is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University. Among his multiple books, Pragmatist Aesthetics has been published in 16 languages, and his work on philosophy as an art of living is highlighted in Bloomsbury’s Foucault’s Aesthetics of Existence and Shusterman’s Somaesthetics. The French government awarded Shusterman the title of Chevalier des Palmes Académiques for his philosophical and cultural work.
Prof Charlie Louth:
Title: A less familiar Rilke?
Description: Rilke is can undoubtedly be called a spiritual poet, in particular because of the extraordinary attention he gave to sensations and experiences at the very edge of what we are able to perceive and find words for. This extended to an interest in spiritism, the attempt to communicate with the dead. But this talk focusses on a poem rarely mentioned, ‘Vollmacht’ (Full Power), which is about hunting. Reading it, I will try to ascertain how it fits into Rilke’s work, while also attempting to show what Rilke’s specific achievement is - not so much any particular lesson, but a distinct approach to experience.
Bio: Charlie Louth is the Fellow in German at The Queen’s College, Oxford, and Professor of German and Comparative Literature. Recent books are Rilke: The Life of the Work (2020), Crossings: Essays on Poetry and Translation from Hölderlin to Jaccottet (2024), and The Complete Correspondence of Friedrich Hölderlin (2025). He has also translated Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and Letter from the Young Worker for Penguin Classics (2011) and is the author of many articles, mostly on German poetry from Goethe to Celan.
An archive recording will be made for the EICSP archive.
NB: There will be no refund if you cancel your booking.
Booking: By Paypal.
Contact: Neill Walker, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
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