Rainer Maria Rilke
1875 – 1926 · Austria
Known for: Austrian poet of the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus
“Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy of being no one's sleep under so many lids.”
Biography
Rainer Maria Rilke was born René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke in Prague on 4 December 1875, the son of Josef Rilke, a railway official whose military career had come to nothing, and of Sophie Entz, who came from a prosperous Prague family. His childhood was uneasy. His mother was still mourning an infant daughter who had died within a week of birth, and for a time she dressed and treated her son as a girl; his parents separated when he was eight. He was sent to the military academy at Sankt Pölten in 1886 and left five years later because of illness, tried a trade school in Linz, and was expelled in 1892. Three years of private tutoring in Prague carried him through the university entrance examination in 1895, and in 1896 he left for Munich.
In Munich in 1897 he met Lou Andreas-Salomé, the writer and thinker who persuaded him to exchange René for the firmer Rainer and who remained his closest confidante for the rest of his life. With her he made two long journeys to Russia and met Tolstoy in Moscow. At the artists' colony of Worpswede in 1900 he met the sculptor Clara Westhoff, whom he married the following year and with whom he had a daughter, Ruth. In 1902 he went to Paris to write a monograph on Auguste Rodin and stayed on, for a time as the sculptor's secretary. Rodin taught him patient looking without commentary, and out of that lesson came the New Poems of 1907 and 1908, the thing poems that broke with his earlier incantatory manner. Paris also gave him his only novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, completed in January 1910. Two years later, staying at Castle Duino near Trieste, he began the Duino Elegies, and then could not finish them.
The silence lasted a decade, across the years of the First World War. It broke in February 1922 at the Château de Muzot in the Swiss Valais, where within a few weeks he completed the Duino Elegies and wrote the Sonnets to Orpheus. He spent his last years in Switzerland, writing in French as well as in German, and died of leukaemia on 29 December 1926 at the Valmont sanatorium above Montreux, at the age of fifty one. He was buried at Raron in the Valais, beneath lines he had chosen himself. Letters to a Young Poet, ten letters written to the young cadet Franz Xaver Kappus, appeared after his death and has been read ever since far beyond the study of literature.