Rainer Maria Rilke 1875 – 1926

Biography

Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and endured a lonely, pressured childhood before studying literature and art history. He became one of the great lyric poets of the German language, writing the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, poems of angels, solitude, death, and transformation that remain among the most admired of the twentieth century. He also wrote the novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and the Letters to a Young Poet, his celebrated advice to an aspiring writer. Restless and often ill, he moved between European cities, castles, and sanatoriums, supported by patrons and friends. He died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1926, and is buried in the churchyard at Raron. His Elegies, written in a burst of inspiration at Duino Castle, are considered his masterpiece and a high point of European poetry.