Austrian poet, born in Prague in 1875 to a German-speaking family, and by broad consensus one of the two or three greatest 20th-century poets in the German language. Rilke spent his early adulthood traveling Europe on the margins of its literary and aristocratic worlds — a crucial stint in 1902–1903 as secretary to the sculptor Auguste Rodin gave him what he later called his education as an artist — and produced the books that define him across roughly the last twenty years of his life. He died of leukemia in a Swiss sanatorium at 51.
The central work comes in three bursts. New Poems (1907–1908), the "thing-poems" written under Rodin's influence, attempt to register objects in language with the concentrated attention a sculptor brings to form — the panther in the Jardin des Plantes, the archaic torso of Apollo, the Paris carousel. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), his only novel, a fragmented modernist meditation on solitude, poverty, and inheritance in a Paris that would strike later readers as recognizably the world of Joyce and Kafka. And — after a long silence — the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus (both 1923), written in a famous two-week outpouring at Muzot in February 1922 after years of preparation. The Elegies are a sustained meditation on angels and mortality, on praise as the proper human office, and on whether beauty can be borne; the Sonnets are the lighter, more affirmative companion.
Rilke's influence on 20th-century literary and philosophical reception of existence — on Heidegger (Elucidations of Hölderlin's Poetry and What Are Poets For? both take Rilke as exemplary), on contemporary religious readers, on everyone who has ever been given Letters to a Young Poet (1929, posthumous) at a decisive moment in their twenties — is larger than his slender published output would suggest. His work sits in the space his reception has opened for it: poetry as a form of attention adequate to the fact of death, of love, of the created object, of the silent thing that happens in the mind at the edge of speech.