Of all early 20th century German poets, the most highly celebrated is perhaps Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). All German poets are put to the test, struggling in order to emerge from the long shadow cast by Goethe (1749-1832), but none have had as much success as Rilke in terms of garnering such a large international audience.
 He is unique among well known poets in that his most famous work is actually a piece of prose writing, not poetry. “Letters to A Young Poet”, the first letter of which was written in 1903, is a short novella compiled of letters to an aspiring poet and is more oft to be placed amongst the self-help section of the bookstore instead of alongside works of fiction or essays where it would be more accurately catalogued. As with many poets, his artistic expression flowered early in life and was followed with the passing of a silent period. While numerous authors and poets bloom again late in life, catching a second wind; poets such as Robert Frost (1874-1963) and Walt Whitman (1819-1892) come to mined, few do so in a language not of their mother tongue.
Born in Prague, Rilke nonetheless was educated in German in a military academy and studied in both German and Czech universities in Prague and Berlin. Curiously enough, Rilke’s mother would call him by the name “Sophia” and clothed him in female attire as a result of a previous child who died in still-birth and was a baby girl. Sophia is also known in many Mediterranean mythologies as the name of The Muse, or Goddess of Poetry. Coincidence?
After completing his education, Rilke lived in Paris for almost 15 years. There he would rub shoulders with many of the great French poets of the day, but also, the country’s most famous sculptor, Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), who employed the poet for work largely secretarial. Rilke even married one his female understudies, Klara Westhoff.
When World War I (1915-1918) “The War to End All Wars”, broke out, Rilke had to leave France and he served in the Austrian army. After the war he traveled extensively, Russia, Italy, and Switzerland, to name a few places. Many poets are drawn to Egypt during the course of their travels and Rilke is no exception. In 1923, only three years prior to Rilke’s death, his two crowning achievements as poet were published, these being the “Duino Elegies”, and “Sonnets to Orpheus”. For those German language trivia buffs out there, these are known as “Duinesser Elegien” and “Die Sonette an Orpheus”; easy to remember as the English names are close cognates.
While these works stand head and shoulder above his previous exposés, what was to follow was equally if not more astonishing. Having felt he had reached the upper limits of what he could achieve as a poet of the German language, Rilke did the unthinkable and began his poetic efforts anew in French. Convinced that being re-born as a beginner would give him new inspiration, Rilke composed no fewer then 400 works of poetry in his final years! If he had never written a single word of German, he would have composed more poems in a few years, all in a foreign language, than most poets compose in their native tongue during their entire lives. Rilke passed away in Val-Mont, Switzerland in 1926.
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