conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a story titled Diaries of a Young Poet about Lou, ``Every, Count with the genre: Literature & Fiction, History & Criticism.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The musings of a writer during his apprenticeship. the author (18751926) spent two and a half years, from 1898 to 1900, keeping a diary at the suggestion of his lover, Lou Andreas- Salom. This intrinsically private work takes shape as an impassioned miscellany, including drafts of poems, gossip about the author's friends and acquaintances, direct observations of place, his reflections on art and architecture from the Renaissance to Rodin, and fictional tales. Mixed in with this stimulating hodgepodge is some blather. ``Every day is the beginning of life,'' exulted the author in 1900. ``Every life is the beginning of eternity.'' But the youthful Romantic could be witty as well as narcotically lyric. One of the diary's climactic moments comes as he commits to paper his adventure of trying to visit and impress Count Leo Tolstoy at the great man's country estate with Lou: ``A dog comes right up to us, trusting and friendly, as we stand there in front of the small glass door. I bend down to the white dog and as I straighten up again I see behind the glass, vague and distorted by the flaws of the pane, a pair of searching eyes in a small grizzled face. The door opens, lets You [Lou] in and slams sharply against me, so that I, only after the Count has already greeted You, come in and now also stand before him, feeling awkwardly large.'' the author's actual visual sense takes the measure of Florence evocatively: ``The ornamentation that nestles up against the columns is in the best instances unobtrusive and straightforward, a beautiful thought or a tender feeling elicited by the column.'' The poems included are languorously unfinished reveries, brimming with girls, flowers, and boyish, transcendent emotion. But the author was not always sacramentally poetic; even ``a dachsund with the demeanor of a sphinx'' could catch his eye and spur his sentences. Platitudes, poetry, and revelations for the author's many American admirers--translated for the first time into English. (photos, not seen) -- <I>Copyright &copy;1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.</I>
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first four paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Diaries of a Young Poet
  Dr. Carl Hauptmann is here for a week. He is a great, strong, grappling soul, someone who does not speak lightly. A great seriousness and a great striving after truth are evident in him. He gives me much to ponder. He read from his diary: "Things Contemplative and Lyrical." Harshly voiced German, weighty and inflexible, yet great and deep. Cast off your vanity and be human. Vanity erects walls between you and Nature. You can't get through to it. Art suffers accordingly. Grow deeper, live from the inside out, not from the outside in. And thus against Paris on my behalf.
  In contrast to him Rainer Maria Rilke, a subtle lyrical talent, delicate and sensitive, with small, wonderfully poignant hands. He read us his poems, delicate and full of mysterious insight. Sweet and pale. The two men will never at heart understand each other. Realism and idealism perpetually at war.
  In the expanded version of 1904, which Rilke dedicated to Eleonora Duse (no doubt hoping she would play the central role), the two women resolve at the end to henceforth devote themselves to charitable work among their plague-stricken neighbors.
  Entrance gate to "Barkenhoff." Left: Otto Modersohn; right: Paula Modersohn-Becker and Martha Vogeler.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me another paragraph.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Entrance gate to "Barkenhoff." Left: Otto Modersohn; right: Paula Modersohn-Becker and Martha Vogeler.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.. End with the sentence ' At the same time his voice grows more inward, and his quintessential blend of landscape, longing, and memory comes into existence as one reads.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: In contrast to him Rainer Maria Rilke, a subtle lyrical talent, delicate and sensitive, with small, wonderfully poignant hands. He read us his poems, delicate and full of mysterious insight. Sweet and pale. The two men will never at heart understand each other. Realism and idealism perpetually at war.
  In the expanded version of 1904, which Rilke dedicated to Eleonora Duse (no doubt hoping she would play the central role), the two women resolve at the end to henceforth devote themselves to charitable work among their plague-stricken neighbors.
  Entrance gate to "Barkenhoff." Left: Otto Modersohn; right: Paula Modersohn-Becker and Martha Vogeler.
  In April 1898 Rainer Maria Rilke, not yet twenty-three, began a diary of his Florence visit. It was to record, in the form of an imaginary dialogue with his mentor and lover, Lou Andreas-Salomé, his firsthand experiences of early Renaissance art. The descriptive project quickly expanded to include not only thoughts on life, history, and artistic genius, but also unguarded moments of revulsion, self-doubt, and manic expectation. The result is an intimate glimpse into the young Rilke, still full of Nietzschean fervor and dreamy Botticellian fantasy, anxiously enamored of a woman fifteen years his senior, already experimenting brilliantly with language and metaphor.
  Rilke completed his Florence diary in early July. Two others followed. In these "Schmargendorf" and "Worpswede" diaries, Rilke begins to reach toward other people—among them the sculptor Clara Westhoff, whom he would marry, and the painter Paula Becker, whose death would haunt him all his life. At the same time his voice grows more inward, and his quintessential blend of landscape, longing, and memory comes into existence as one reads.