Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) was born in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and wrote in German. After leaving a military academy he studied philosophy and the history of art, and published his first books of verse in the 1890s.

In 1902 he went to Paris, where he worked as a secretary to the sculptor Auguste Rodin; the plastic, observing eye of the New Poems (1907–08) owes much to that apprenticeship. The Book of Hours, written between 1899 and 1903, is a cycle of prayers spoken by a Russian monk, and was his first major work.

Rilke spent his later years largely in Switzerland, where he completed the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus (1922). The poems here are taken from the 1918 English selection by Jessie Lemont, published in New York by Tobias A. Wright, with an introduction by H. T.