Rainer Rilke
A mystic lyricism and precise imagery often marked verse of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose collections profoundly influenced 20th-century German literature and include
The Book of Hours
(1905) and
The Duino Elegies
(1923).
People consider him of the greatest 20th century users of the language.
His haunting images tend to focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety — themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.
His two most famous sequences include the
Sonnets to Orpheus
, and his most famous prose works include the
Letters to a Young Poet
and the semi-autobiographical
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
.
He also wrote more than four hundred poems in French, dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland, his homeland of choice.
“Go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside”