Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke was born René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke on 4 December 1875 in Prague, then the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia under Austria-Hungary. He became an Austrian poet widely recognized as a significant writer in the German language, though he also wrote in French. Critics and scholars have often described his work as idiosyncratic and expressive, with undertones of mysticism and a steady interest in subjective experience and disbelief.

Rilke’s early life was unsettled. His father, Josef Rilke, worked as a railway official after an unsuccessful military career. His mother, Sophie “Phia” Entz, came from a well-to-do Prague family, and her relationship with her son was shaped by mourning for an infant daughter who had died within a week of birth. Rilke later said that, as a child, he had to wear “fine clothes” and was “a plaything” for his mother, “like a big doll.” His parents separated in 1884. Though poetically and artistically gifted, he was sent to a military academy in Sankt Pölten, left because of illness, later entered a trade school in Linz, and then returned to Prague to prepare for university entrance exams. He passed in 1895 and studied literature, art history, and philosophy before leaving school in 1896 and moving to Munich.

In Munich in 1897, Rilke met Lou Andreas-Salomé, a widely travelled intellectual woman of letters. At her urging, he changed his first name from René to Rainer, because she thought it more masculine, forceful, and Germanic. Their relationship lasted until 1900, and she remained his most important confidante to the end of his life. With her, Rilke travelled to Russia, meeting Leo Tolstoy in Moscow in 1899 and returning in 1900 to Moscow and Saint Petersburg, where he met the family of Boris Pasternak and the peasant poet Spiridon Drozhzhin. The cultures of Bohemia and Russia have been cited as key influences on his poetry and consciousness.

Rilke’s career was also shaped by artists and places. In 1900 he stayed at the artists’ colony at Worpswede, where he met the sculptor Clara Westhoff, whom he married the next year. Their daughter Ruth was born in 1901. In 1902 he went to Paris to write a monograph on Auguste Rodin. Paris was difficult for him at first, an experience later used in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, his only novel. Yet the city also drew him into modernism. Rodin taught him the value of objective observation, and Rilke’s poetic style changed sharply, leading to New Poems and the “thing-poems” for which that period is known.

Among English-language readers, Rilke is best known for Duino Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and the posthumously published Letters to a Young Poet. He began Duino Elegies in 1912 at Castle Duino, near Trieste, but a long creative crisis left the cycle unfinished for a decade. He travelled widely through Europe and finally settled in Switzerland, which inspired many of his poems. In the later 20th century, his work reached new audiences through self-help writers and frequent quotations in television, books, and motion pictures. His words still speak because they stay close to inner life: doubt, perception, solitude, and the strange pressure of being alive.