"The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing"
About this Quote
Rilke makes creation sound less like conquest and more like gestation, and that’s the provocation: to call the creator’s “deepest experience” feminine is to flip the usual heroic mythology of art-making. The line rejects the swaggering, masculine-coded fantasy of the artist as a lone genius who imposes his will on the world. Instead, Rilke insists on receptivity as the primary artistic virtue: the capacity to be entered by something you didn’t author, to be changed by it, and then to carry it long enough that it can take form.
“Receiving and bearing” does a lot of quiet work. It’s bodily language smuggled into aesthetics, suggesting that art isn’t assembled so much as endured, protected, timed. The subtext is ethical as much as poetic: if making requires receiving, then the maker owes allegiance to what arrives - experience, grief, love, the world itself - rather than to ego or spectacle. That position also flatters vulnerability, patience, and waiting, qualities modern culture routinely treats as passive or lesser.
Context matters. Rilke is writing from a turn-of-the-century European milieu obsessed with gendered binaries, but also from a personal practice built on “inwardness,” solitude, and the slow incubation of images. He isn’t making a neat claim about women; he’s borrowing “feminine” as a metaphor for artistic permeability. Still, the risk is baked in: the metaphor depends on essentialism even as it tries to dignify what patriarchy discounts. The line lands because it’s both a corrective and a confession - creativity as surrender with consequences.
“Receiving and bearing” does a lot of quiet work. It’s bodily language smuggled into aesthetics, suggesting that art isn’t assembled so much as endured, protected, timed. The subtext is ethical as much as poetic: if making requires receiving, then the maker owes allegiance to what arrives - experience, grief, love, the world itself - rather than to ego or spectacle. That position also flatters vulnerability, patience, and waiting, qualities modern culture routinely treats as passive or lesser.
Context matters. Rilke is writing from a turn-of-the-century European milieu obsessed with gendered binaries, but also from a personal practice built on “inwardness,” solitude, and the slow incubation of images. He isn’t making a neat claim about women; he’s borrowing “feminine” as a metaphor for artistic permeability. Still, the risk is baked in: the metaphor depends on essentialism even as it tries to dignify what patriarchy discounts. The line lands because it’s both a corrective and a confession - creativity as surrender with consequences.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mother |
|---|
More Quotes by Rainer
Add to List
