Rainer Maria Rilke

(1875 - 1926)

Rainer Maria Rilke published his first collection of poetry in 1894, dropped out of a Prague university in 1896, and met Leo Tolstoy in Russia in 1900. Later, he suffered from a thirteen-year period of writer’s block before, in a weeklong burst of creativity in 1922, he completed his Duino Elegies and wrote his fifty-five-poem cycle, Sonnets to Orpheus. He died four years later at the age of fifty-one.