Rainer Maria Rilke

René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926), known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was a poet and novelist who wrote in German. He was born in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and he is widely regarded as one of the most important German-language poets. His work, often inward and searching, returns again and again to subjective experience and to a doubt about faith that sits uneasily beside a longing for the sacred. He also wrote in French, and alongside his verse he left a single novel and a large body of letters.

His childhood in Prague was not an easy one. His father, Josef Rilke, had a modest military career and later worked as a railway official. His mother, Sophie Entz, came from a family of manufacturers and never got over the early death of a daughter. Rilke later recalled that for years she treated him almost as a girl, dressing him in fine clothes and handling him like a large doll. His parents separated in 1884. Hoping to secure him a respectable social position, the family sent him to military schools in Austria, years he later described as a harsh education in horrors. Poor health forced him to leave, and after a spell at a commercial school in Linz he returned to Prague, where he prepared for and passed the university entrance examination in 1895.

At the university he studied literature, art history and philosophy, though he gave his studies little real attention. He had already published a first book of poems, strongly shaped by Heinrich Heine, and he was determined to make his living from writing. In 1896 he moved to Munich, and in 1897 he met Lou Andreas-Salomé, a writer some fourteen years his senior, with whom he had an intense relationship until 1900. She became much more than a companion: she introduced him to Russia, travelled with him there on two occasions, and encouraged him to change his name from René to Rainer. The journeys shaped the cycle The Book of Hours, which he later regarded as the true beginning of his serious work.

In 1901 he married the sculptor Clara Westhoff, and their daughter Ruth was born that December. The following year he moved to Paris to write about Auguste Rodin and soon became the sculptor's secretary. From Rodin he learned to observe with a detached, exact eye and to treat the poem as a finished object. That discipline transformed his style and produced the New Poems, with its celebrated thing-poems. In Paris he also wrote The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, a fragmentary novel about loneliness and dread in the big city.

The First World War caught him in Germany and kept him from returning to Paris, where his property was seized. For years he wrote little poetry. He settled in Switzerland in 1919, and in 1921 found a home at the Château de Muzot in the Valais. There, in February 1922, he finished the Duino Elegies in a few weeks, after a decade of stalled work, and in the same period he wrote the Sonnets to Orpheus. He died in 1926 of leukaemia, after a life of almost constant travel.

His legacy is twofold. He stands among the major figures of twentieth-century German poetry and remains a touchstone for later poets. His letters, including the advice gathered as Letters to a Young Poet, have reached a much wider public, often quoted out of context in self-help books and television, a use he could not have anticipated.