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Rainer Maria Rilke
(1875 - 1926) Austria

Rainer Maria Rilke

Lyric poet

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Born in Prague, Rilke was until he was six or seven got up in skirts by his mother, who named him René and tried to console herself for the death of an infant daughter.

By the time Rilke was ten, his disappointed romantic of a mother had left his father, a kindly but ineffectual minor railway official, who had spent some years in the Austrian army unsuccessfully seeking commission as an officer. Rilke's parents decided to send the young boy to military school, a prospect that stirred the father's hopes of turning his son into a soldier.

Rilke lived on the brink of poverty for much of his life, dependent on the good graces of aristocratic and haute-bourgeois patrons in the twilight of the Hapsburg Empire. His shaky situation, much as he complained of it, suited his temperament as well as did the black clothes he liked to parade in during his dandyish younger days in Prague.

Like the great German mystics, Rilke was a confirmed solitary. Thus he sought to form emotional bonds with people more ardently than do those who take their desire to be with others for granted. Wandering from person to person and from place to place like a pilgrim, he found that patrons offered him, among more practical things, a potential shrine of emotional fulfillment.

Rilke traveled widely, especially in Russia, and was for a time the sculptor Rodin's secretary. His prose work include the semi-autobiographical Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge, 1910), and his poetical works Die Sonnette an Orpheus (Sonnetts to Orpheus, 1923). His verse is characterized by a form of mystic pantheism. Rilke died from leukemia in Switzerland.

The writer Sir Harold Nicolson, who knew him personally, assures that Rilke was a repressed homosexual.

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