Rainer Maria Rilke

René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke was born on December 4, 1875, in Prague, then a provincial capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire ^[1]. His father, Josef Rilke, had abandoned a stalled military career for a modest post with a railway company, while his mother, Sophie, came from a prosperous Prague manufacturing family and never reconciled herself to the marriage's limited social standing ^[2]. The couple separated when the boy was nine.

His childhood carried an odd shadow. Sophie had lost a daughter in infancy before René's birth, and for several years she dressed her son in girls' clothing and treated him partly as a replacement for the dead child, an experience the adult poet returned to repeatedly in letters and in his prose ^[2]. At ten he was sent to the military academy at Sankt Pölten, a decision meant to restore the family's soldierly ambitions. He was physically frail and emotionally unsuited to barracks life, and he later described those five years as a sustained misery. Ill health ended the experiment in 1891 ^[1].

After a brief stint at a trade school and private tutoring, he passed his school-leaving examination in 1895 and enrolled at the Charles University in Prague, studying literature, art history, and philosophy before moving on to Munich in 1896 ^[1]. By then he had already published his first collection of verse, Leben und Lieder (Lives and Songs), in 1894, juvenile work he later disowned but which announced a young man determined to write ^[3].

Munich changed everything. In 1897 Rilke met Lou Andreas-Salomé, the Russian-born writer and intellectual who had once refused a marriage proposal from Friedrich Nietzsche. She was fifteen years his senior, married, and formidably educated; the two began an affair and a friendship that outlasted it, continuing in letters until his death ^[4]. It was Salomé who persuaded him to change his first name from the French-sounding René to the firmer, more Germanic Rainer, and who sharpened his discipline as a writer ^[4].

With Salomé and her husband he traveled twice to Russia, in 1899 and 1900, meeting Leo Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana and absorbing what he took to be a deep, unselfconscious piety in Russian peasant life ^[1]. Those journeys fed The Book of Hours (Das Stunden-Buch), written between 1899 and 1903 and published in 1905, a sequence of prayer-like poems spoken by a fictional Russian monk. The book found a wide audience and established his early reputation ^[3].

A different apprenticeship began in 1902, when a commission to write a monograph on the sculptor Auguste Rodin brought Rilke to Paris. He served for a time as Rodin's secretary and watched, at close range, an artist who worked daily and steadily rather than waiting for inspiration ^[5]. The lesson reshaped his poetics. Instead of pouring out feeling, he began building poems around close observation of objects, animals, and works of art. The results appeared in the two volumes of New Poems (Neue Gedichte, 1907 and 1908), which contain some of his most anthologized pieces, including The Panther and Archaic Torso of Apollo, the latter ending with the famous imperative that the reader must change his life ^[3].

Any account of Rainer Maria Rilke achievements has to begin with the Duino Elegies. In January 1912, staying at Duino Castle on the Adriatic coast as a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, he wrote the opening lines of the first elegy, by his own account after hearing them as if spoken in the wind above the cliffs ^[6]. The cycle then stalled for a decade, interrupted by depression and by the First World War. In February 1922, at the Château de Muzot in the Swiss canton of Valais, the remaining elegies arrived in an extraordinary rush of a few weeks, and alongside them, unplanned, came the fifty-five Sonnets to Orpheus ^[6]. Both works were published in 1923 and are widely regarded as summits of twentieth-century poetry in German ^[1].

The elegies wrestle with human transience, the inadequacy of consciousness, and the figure of the angel, an image Rilke insisted was not the angel of Christian tradition but a being in whom the transformation of the visible into the invisible was already complete ^[6]. The sonnets, written in memory of a young dancer named Wera Ouckama Knoop, answer that severity with praise: song, in their argument, is a mode of existence rather than a request.

His single novel deserves equal weight. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) follows a young Danish writer adrift in Paris and records urban fear, illness, and memory in fragmented prose that anticipated later modernist experiments ^[3]. And one small book has outsold nearly everything else: Letters to a Young Poet, ten letters written between 1902 and 1908 to the military cadet Franz Xaver Kappus and published in 1929, after Rilke's death. Its advice, to live the questions and to test whether one must write, has made it a permanent companion for aspiring artists ^[7].

In 1901 Rilke married the sculptor Clara Westhoff, whom he had met in the artists' colony at Worpswede in northern Germany, where he also grew close to the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker ^[2]. Their daughter Ruth was born in December of that year. The household did not last. Within a year the couple agreed to live apart so that each could work, and though they never divorced, Rilke spent the rest of his life without a fixed home, moving between Paris, Italy, Spain, Scandinavia, North Africa, and the estates of aristocratic patrons ^[1].

He depended on such patrons to an unusual degree. Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis lent him Duino Castle; the merchant Werner Reinhart later bought the tower at Muzot and let him live there without rent ^[6]. Publishers, friends, and admirers filled the gaps. Rilke gave back, in part, through letters: he was one of the great correspondents of his age, and thousands of his letters survive, many of them small essays on art, solitude, and love ^[4].

His attachments after Clara included the painter Lou Albert-Lasard and, most consequentially for his late work, the artist Baladine Klossowska, whose son Balthus became a celebrated painter partly through Rilke's early encouragement; the poet wrote the preface to the eleven-year-old boy's book of cat drawings, Mitsou, in 1921 ^[2]. The First World War caught Rilke in Germany, where his Paris property was confiscated and auctioned. Conscripted in 1916, he spent months in the Austrian war archives in Vienna doing clerical work before influential friends secured his release, an episode that deepened his horror of the war ^[1].

Switzerland gave him his final refuge. Rilke moved there in 1919, ostensibly for a lecture invitation in Zurich, and in 1921 settled at the Château de Muzot, a small thirteenth-century tower near Sierre in the Rhône valley ^[6]. There the long-delayed elegies were completed, and there he wrote, in his last years, a substantial body of poems in French, collected in volumes such as Vergers (Orchards, 1926), a gesture of gratitude toward the French-speaking Valais and toward the language of Paul Valéry, whom he translated and admired ^[3].

His health, never robust, collapsed in the mid 1920s. From 1923 onward he spent long periods at the sanatorium of Val-Mont above Territet, on Lake Geneva. Physicians eventually identified the underlying illness as leukemia ^[1]. A widely repeated story connects his final decline to an infection from a rose thorn pricked while gathering flowers in his garden; the wound did become septic, but the leukemia was the disease that killed him, and the rose anecdote survives mostly because it suits a poet who had made the rose one of his signature images ^[2].

Rilke died at Val-Mont, near Montreux, on December 29, 1926, at the age of fifty-one ^[1]. He was buried at the small hillside churchyard of Raron in the Valais, beneath an epitaph he had composed himself, a three-line riddle on the rose as pure contradiction ^[6].

Few poets of his era travel so well across languages. Rilke's work has been translated into English by a long line of poets and scholars, including J. B. Leishman, Stephen Mitchell, and Edward Snow, and his books remain steadily in print in dozens of languages ^[7]. Philosophers took him seriously as well: Martin Heidegger devoted a major essay, What Are Poets For?, to Rilke's late poetry, treating him as a thinker of the modern condition rather than merely a lyricist ^[8].

His influence runs through twentieth-century poetry in German, from Paul Celan's generation onward, and through anglophone writers as different as W. H. Auden and Denise Levertov. Composers set his verse; the Letters to a Young Poet became a fixture of graduation gifts and writing classrooms; individual lines, above all the injunction from Archaic Torso of Apollo to change one's life, entered common speech ^[3]. Basic Rainer Maria Rilke facts, such as his Prague birth and his burial at Raron, now anchor literary pilgrimages in three countries, and the Fondation Rilke in Sierre maintains an archive and museum near his final home ^[6].

Critics have not treated him uncritically. His dependence on wealthy patrons, his detachment from his wife and daughter, and some late letters expressing sympathy for Mussolini have all drawn scrutiny in modern scholarship ^[2]. Yet the poems have absorbed every reassessment. A Rainer Maria Rilke biography written today still ends where his readers begin: with a body of work that insists inwardness is not an escape from the world but a way of holding it, transformed, in language ^[1].