Rainer Maria Rilke

Austrian poet of solitude and the inner life. He had a brutal early childhood — his mother dressed him as a girl in mourning for a lost daughter, then sent him to a military academy where he was miserable. He escaped into language. He worked for a time as Auguste Rodin's secretary in Paris, which taught him what disciplined attention to a single object could do. In 1903 a young military cadet named Franz Kappus wrote to him asking whether his poems were any good. Rilke's replies became *Letters to a Young Poet* — ten letters that are less about poetry than about how to live with uncertainty, longing, solitude, and the questions that have no answers yet. His masterpieces — the *Duino Elegies* and the *Sonnets to Orpheus* — were written in a sudden burst at Muzot in 1922 after ten years of silence. He died of leukemia in 1926, at fifty-one. Core teaching: do not rush past what is hard or unresolved. Live the questions. The answers, if they come, come later — and often by being lived, not thought. Key works: *Letters to a Young Poet*, *Duino Elegies*, *Sonnets to Orpheus*, *The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge*, *The Book of Hours*.