René Karl Wilhelm Johann Maria Rilke (Rainer Maria Rilke)

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) was born in Prague. Travelling to Russia with his lover Lou Andreas-Salomé in 1899, he experienced an epiphany meeting Leo Tolstoy and absorbing Russian peasant spirituality. In Paris, working as personal secretary to sculptor Auguste Rodin, Rilke learned to 'see' physical objects with sculptural precision, creating his revolutionary 'thing-poems' (*Dinggedichte*) in New Poems (1907), such as The Panther and Archaic Torso of Apollo ('You must change your life').

His epistolary classic Letters to a Young Poet (1929) became humanity's most cherished handbook on solitary creative courage. In winter 1912, walking along the storm-battered sea cliffs of Duino Castle near Trieste, Rilke heard an angelic voice calling out in the wind: 'Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?' After a ten-year struggle interrupted by WWI, at the isolated Swiss stone tower of Château de Muzot in February 1922, Rilke completed the ten Duino Elegies and the fifty-five Sonnets to Orpheus in a single miraculous hurricane of inspiration.