Rainer Maria Rilke

In 1903, a student at a military academy sent some of his verses to a well-known Austrian poet, requesting an assessment of their value. The older artist, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), replied to the novice in this series of letters — an amazing archive of remarkable insights into the ideas behind Rilke's greatest …

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge was Rainer Maria Rilke's only novel. It was written while Rilke lived in Paris, and was published in 1910. The novel is semi-autobiographical, and is written in an expressionistic style. The work was inspired by Sigbjørn Obstfelder's work A Priest's Diary and Jens Peter Jacobsen's …

Named after the Castle of Duino on a rocky headland of the Adriatic, the "Duino Elegies" speak in a voice that is both intimate and majestic on the mysteries of human life and our attempt, in the words of the translator, "to use our self-consciousness to some advantage: to transcend, through art and the imagination, …

The Sonnets to Orpheus are a cycle of 55 sonnets written in 1922 by the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. It was first published the following year. Rilke, who is "widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets," wrote the cycle in a period of three weeks experiencing what he …

The Book of Images is a collection of poetry by the Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke. It was first published in 1902 by Axel Juncker Verlag. It consists of individual poems written from 1899 and forward. An extended version was published in 1906, after Rilke had written The Book of Hours, with …