Rilke finished the Duino Elegies in a few weeks
Rainer Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926) remains a summit of German-language lyric. He drafted the Duino Elegies at Castle Duino in 1912, then stalled for a decade—until February 1922 at the Château de Muzot, when weeks of work completed the cycle and both halves of the Sonnets to Orpheus.
Born René in Prague under Austria-Hungary to railway official Josef Rilke and Sophie (“Phia”) Entz, he endured a strained childhood after an infant sister’s death and his parents’ 1884 separation. Military school at Sankt Pölten (1886–91) ended in illness; after Linz and private tutoring he passed university entrance in 1895 and moved to Munich in 1896. In 1897 Lou Andreas-Salomé urged the name Rainer; their bond, including two Russian journeys that met Tolstoy and the Pasternaks, outlasted romance as lifelong counsel. At Worpswede he met sculptor Clara Westhoff; they married in 1901 and had daughter Ruth, though a Catholic divorce proved bureaucratically blocked.
Paris after 1902, writing on Rodin and absorbing Cézanne, remade his style into the objective “thing-poems” of New Poems (1907–08) and the novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (finished January 1910). War stranded him in Germany; property in Paris was seized. Drafted in 1916, he was shifted to war records and discharged that June—service that nearly silenced him. Switzerland after June 1919 finally offered quiet: by mid-1921 Muzot became home; patron Werner Reinhart bought it in May 1922 so Rilke could live rent-free. Letters to a Young Poet, Duino Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus, and later French verse such as Vergers (1926) cemented his fame.
Critics hear mysticism, subjective experience, and disbelief braided through the poems. Late health crises—leukemia diagnosed near the end—brought sanatorium stays; he died open-eyed in his doctor’s arms at Valmont and was buried at Raron on 2 January 1927. A rose-thorn myth grew around the death; the documented illness was leukemia. English readers still meet him first through the elegies, the Orpheus sonnets, Malte, and those ten posthumous letters.
Source: Rainer Maria Rilke
