Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague in 1875 and died in Switzerland in 1926, and is one of the most widely read poets of the German language — author of the Duino Elegies, the Sonnets to Orpheus and the novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Between 1903 and 1908 he answered ten letters from Franz Xaver Kappus, a teenage officer cadet at the Theresian Military Academy who had asked whether his poems were any good. Rilke mostly declined to judge the poems and wrote instead about solitude, patience and the uses of difficulty — letters that Kappus published in 1929, three years after Rilke’s death, and which became Rilke’s most-read book.