Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke was a Bohemian-Austrian poet writing primarily in German whose work is among the most studied in twentieth-century European poetry. His major books include the early Stundenbuch, the prose narrative Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, the late cycles Duineser Elegien (the Duino Elegies) and Sonette an Orpheus, and the prose collection Briefe an einen jungen Dichter, widely translated as Letters to a Young Poet.

He was born René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke in Prague in 1875, then a city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His early life included a difficult enrolment at a military academy at St. Pölten, university study at Prague, Munich, and Berlin, and a 1899 trip to Russia with the writer Lou Andreas-Salomé that introduced him to Leo Tolstoy and shaped the religious tone of his early collections.

From 1902 he lived intermittently in Paris, where he worked for a period as secretary to the sculptor Auguste Rodin and produced a monograph on Rodin's work. The encounter pushed his poetry toward what he called the Dinggedicht, the thing-poem, an attempt to render objects with the same focused attention a sculptor brings to material.

The First World War interrupted his writing for nearly a decade. He completed both the Duineser Elegien, begun at Duino Castle on the Adriatic in 1912, and the Sonette an Orpheus in a single concentrated period at the Château de Muzot in Switzerland in February 1922. He died of leukaemia at Valmont in Switzerland in December 1926.

The forename Rainer is a German form derived from a Germanic compound based on ragin, meaning counsel, and heri, meaning army, traditionally read as "counsel of the army." Lou Andreas-Salomé persuaded him to use Rainer rather than the French René he had been given at birth, and his published work is the reason that German spelling is most familiar to readers of European poetry today.