Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926) was a Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, widely regarded as one of the most significant lyric poets in the German language. [1] His major works include the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, both completed in 1922, the novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), and the posthumously published Letters to a Young Poet. [2] He wrote in an intensely figurative style concerned with solitude, transience and the relation between art and existence.
Early life and education
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke was born in Prague on 4 December 1875, then part of Austria-Hungary. His father was a railway official who had failed in a military career, and his mother, who had lost an infant daughter before his birth, dressed him as a girl in early childhood. At his father's insistence he was sent to a military academy at Sankt Pölten, an experience he later described as deeply damaging, and he left on grounds of ill health. [1]
After private tutoring he passed his school-leaving examination in 1895 and studied literature, art history and philosophy at the German University in Prague and afterwards at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. He published his first collections of verse in these years and changed his given name to the more austere Rainer.
Formative influences
In Munich in 1897 he met Lou Andreas-Salomé, a writer and later psychoanalyst fourteen years his senior, whose intellectual companionship shaped his development. They travelled together to Russia in 1899 and 1900, where he met Leo Tolstoy and encountered an Orthodox religious culture that fed into Das Stunden-Buch (The Book of Hours, 1905). [2]
Settling at the artists' colony of Worpswede, he married the sculptor Clara Westhoff in 1901. Two years later he went to Paris to write a monograph on Auguste Rodin, and served for a period as the sculptor's secretary. Rodin's insistence on disciplined observation prompted the "thing poems" of Neue Gedichte (New Poems, 1907-08), among them "The Panther" and "Archaic Torso of Apollo". [3]
Major works
Paris also produced his only novel, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), a fragmentary first-person account of a young Danish poet in the city that is often read as an early modernist landmark.
In 1912, staying at Duino Castle on the Adriatic as a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, Rilke began the sequence that became the Duineser Elegien. The First World War interrupted the work for a decade; he was briefly conscripted into the Austrian army and spent much of the war in Munich, writing little. In February 1922, at the Château de Muzot in Switzerland, he completed the ten Duino Elegies in a sustained burst of composition and, in the same weeks, wrote the fifty-five Sonette an Orpheus. [1]
His correspondence with the cadet Franz Xaver Kappus, written between 1903 and 1908 and published in 1929 as Briefe an einen jungen Dichter, has become one of the most widely read books on the vocation of the writer.
Death and legacy
Rilke died of leukaemia at a sanatorium near Montreux, Switzerland, on 29 December 1926, and was buried at Raron in the Valais under an epitaph of his own composition. [1]
He also wrote in French in his final years and translated Paul Valéry and others into German. His influence extends well beyond German-language poetry, reaching English-language poets and a broad general readership through repeated translation; the Elegies and Sonnets in particular remain central texts of twentieth-century lyric. [3]
