Rilke, Rainer Maria
Austro-German poet and novelist, regarded as one of the most important and influential modern poets because of his precise, lyrical style, his symbolic imagery, and his spiritual reflections.
Early Life
Influence of Rodin
In Paris in 1902, Rilke met the sculptor Auguste Rodin and was his secretary from 1905 to 1906. Rodin taught the poet to regard artistic work as a religious activity and to make his verse as consistent and complete as sculptures. The poems of this period appear in Neue Gedichte (New Poems, 2 vol., 1907-8). Until the outbreak of World War I, Rilke used Paris as his base, exploring Europe and parts of North Africa. From 1910 to 1912 he lived in Duino Castle near Trieste (now in Italy), where he wrote the poems making up The Life of the Virgin Mary (1913; trans. 1951), later set to music by the German-American composer Paul Hindemith, and the first two of the ten Duino Elegies (1923; trans. 1930).
In his major prose work, a novel begun in Rome in 1904, Journal of My Other Self (1910; trans. 1930), Rilke employed corrosive imagery to convey the reactions to life in Paris of a young writer very like himself. | |
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