flâneur

From “You Must Change Your Life: The Story of… | Poetry Magazine

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Biographers would begin at the beginning. They would describe a boy too busy etching his dull blade into wood to eat. A young man working at a vase factory in...

Biographers would begin at the beginning. They would describe a boy too busy etching his dull blade into wood to eat. A young man working at a vase factory in Sèvres. They would identify his early influences — Dante , Baudelaire , and Michelangelo — and his youthful prophetic awakening, the flash point upon which his future genius hinged. It would be both “common and touching.” But this would be the wrong way to tell the story of Auguste Rodin, or at least not the way Rainer Maria Rilke wanted to tell it. In October, Rodin went to visit a friend in Italy, leaving Rilke with three uninterrupted

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