Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke was a German-language poet born in Prague in 1875. After abandoning a military academy and studying briefly in Prague, Munich, and Berlin, he traveled widely, drawn into the circles of Lou Andreas-Salomé — with whom he lived in Berlin-Schmargendorf and journeyed twice to Russia — the Worpswede artists' colony, and the sculptor Auguste Rodin, whom he first met in 1902 to write a monograph and later served as private secretary in Paris around 1905-1906. His work moved from early lyric collections toward the dense imagery of the New Poems and the novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. As a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis at Duino Castle near Trieste in the winter of 1911-1912 he began the elegies that would take that castle's name. He spent the war years largely in Munich, then settled in the Swiss Valais at the Château de Muzot, where he completed the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. He died of leukemia in 1926 and was buried at Raron.