One of the abiding mysteries in attempting to understand Rilke is how he changed from a caterpillar into a butterfly. Based on Rilke's early beginnings, one would never have expected him to become the sovereign artist of his later years. Investigating his youthful, formative period in great detail is the subject of Professor Schoolfield's absorbing book, a work of exemplary scholarship, cleverly arranged, well-written, and readable.

Rilke's life was a continuous project of self-absorbed self-construction, not the product of outward events. This gives the “and his Time” of the title an uncommon twist: it is not primarily the impact of external events or forces on him that matter, but of Rilke seeing himself reflected in them, and in other people, writers, and to some extent painters. He was a hermit crab constantly searching for a shell that would protect him, and at the same time somehow locate him in the universe. For Rilke this task was so all-consuming that to others he often appeared callous and immature, and indifferent to the world. Professor Schoolfield makes no effort to hide Rilke's warts, which would in any case be difficult, but shows them as constitutive parts of the poet's complex and difficult personality.

The book consists of eighteen chapters on Rilke's life and work from around 1892 to 1900, divided into sections on Prague, a commentary on the poem “Larenopfer,” Rilke's diaries of the period, Rilke as literary critic (especially interesting on Rilke as reviewer of German-language literature and Scandinavian-language literature—Professor Schoolfield is an expert in the latter field as well, and makes good use of it in this book), and poems, the last a discussion of a number of poems Rilke wrote in this period that have not received extensive critical attention. Approaching Rilke from these different perspectives within a limited time period is an excellent strategy; never was an artist's life less suited than Rilke's to the notion of the organic unfolding of genius. Rilke's early years do not lead in any sort of straight line to the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, nor does Professor Schoolfield claim that they do. Perhaps he scants the extent to which Rilke was a poet of the will; he willed himself to be a great poet, and the word and notion occupy a central role in all his work. He made will the virtue of his defects.

For quotations, Professor Schoolfield offers the original German along with straightforward English translations. For a book so rich in detail only a few interesting points can be mentioned. One is how strong the rise of Czech nationalism and the Czech language were in Prague during Rilke's early years, which made Prague's German population increasingly uneasy about their minority status. Rilke was “scarcely proficient” (27) in Czech, and there were anti-German riots. Rilke put Prague behind him once he left it.

From the beginning, the author notes, Rilke's productivity always proceeded by fits and starts. He also had a habit of letting his enthusiasms drop and of exaggerating and overreacting to both things and people, a characteristic noted by both Lou Andreas-Salomé and Princess Marie of Thurn und Taxis. Altogether, Rilke seemed unable to connect with the realities of the world he lived in, amply demonstrated by his decamping from marriage and fatherhood, and underlined in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. While Schoolfield's book presents a wealth of information, it is not a psychological study, although it offers many observations that are psychologically illuminating, such as “a devotee of smiles, Rilke detested and feared laughter” (118, n 6).

In discussing Rilke's reviews of Scandinavian literature, Professor Schoolfield, noting that “Scandinavian literature in German translation was enormously popular from ca. 1880 to ca. 1910, ‘the age of Ibsen’” (223, n1), finds that in reviewing these works Rilke (who had not yet learned Swedish), like most other contemporary reviewers, was overenthusiastic and passed over the books' deficiencies. At times the author's impatience with Rilke's personal qualities, which from a human point of view is understandable, seems overdrawn, but genius takes many forms. The poet “must choose perfection of the life or of the work,” Yeats wrote, and Rilke strove to achieve the latter, for which we today can only be grateful. We can also be grateful for this thorough and illuminating study.