Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke waited ten years for the Duino Elegies to finish themselves and then wrote the last of them, and the whole of the Sonnets to Orpheus, in about three weeks. He was born in Prague and dressed as a girl in early childhood by a mother mourning a dead daughter, then sent to a military academy he loathed. Lou Andreas-Salomé, older and formidable, took him to Russia twice and changed him. He married the sculptor Clara Westhoff, and in 1902 went to Paris to write a book about Rodin and became his secretary; what he took from Rodin was the discipline of looking at a single thing until it yields, which produced the Neue Gedichte - poems about a panther, a fountain, a torso. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is a novel of dread in a city. In 1912 at Duino castle he heard the first line of the Elegies in the wind, wrote a few, and then stopped for a decade through the war and a long silence. In February 1922 at Muzot the rest came at once. He died of leukaemia at fifty-one. Letters to a Young Poet, ten replies written between 1903 and 1908 to a military cadet who had asked whether his verses were any good, has never gone out of print and is read by people who read nothing else of his. He wrote something like fourteen thousand letters. His epitaph, which he composed, is about a rose and its contradiction, and the long-repeated story that he died of an infection from a rose thorn is at best a coincidence with the leukaemia that killed him. He wrote a late cycle in French. His work was set to music and translated constantly through the twentieth century.

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