Biography Essay

Rainer Maria Rilke is one of the major poets of twentieth-century literature. In the collections with which his early verse culminates, Das Buch der Bilder (The Book of Pictures, 1902; enlarged, 1906) and Das Stunden-Buch (1905; translated as The Book of Hours, 1961), he appears as a creator or discoverer of legends— his own and history's—and, particularly in the latter work, as a special brand of mystic. With the poems of his middle years, Neue Gedichte (1907-1908; translated as New Poems, 1964), he is an expert instructor in the art of "seeing" as well as a guide through Europe's cultural sites just before the onslaught of general war and, subsequently, mass tourism. Because of statements in Duineser Elegien (1923; translated as Elegies from the Castle of Duino, 1931) and Die Sonette an Orpheus (1923; translated as Sonnets to Orpheus, 1936) on the limitations and possibilities of the human condition, he has become...