Rainer Maria Rilke

In February 1922, at the Château de Muzot in the Swiss canton of Valais, Rainer Maria Rilke completed all ten of the Duino Elegies in approximately three weeks. He had begun the first elegy in 1912, at Duino Castle on the Adriatic coast, after hearing — or believing he heard — a voice in the wind calling to him across the water. He could not finish what that opening started. He spent ten years trying. At Muzot, in a burst he described as a "hurricane of the spirit," the elegies came. Immediately after completing them, he wrote the fifty-five Sonnets to Orpheus in the same three-week window, as what he called a gift he hadn't expected. Both sequences are considered among the summits of twentieth-century poetry in any language.

• Full name: René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
• Born: December 4, 1875, Prague (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire)
• Died: December 29, 1926, Muzot, Switzerland (age 51, leukemia — triggered by an infection from a rose thorn)
• Era: late Romanticism; early Modernism; German-language literature
• Major works: Das Stunden-Buch / The Book of Hours (1905), Neue Gedichte / New Poems (1907–1908), Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), Duineser Elegien / Duino Elegies (1923), Die Sonette an Orpheus / Sonnets to Orpheus (1923), Letters to a Young Poet (published 1929)

He spent much of his life moving — between cities, between patrons, between languages and countries — driven by the conviction that distraction was the primary enemy of serious work. He guarded his solitude with a ferocity that struck people who loved him as incomprehensible. He turned down meetings, declined invitations, and arranged his life around the conditions under which he could write at full depth.

Letters to a Young Poet — written when he was twenty-seven to a military cadet named Franz Xaver Kappus who had sent him poems asking for guidance — became one of the most enduring guides to the creative life ever written. Its central argument: live the questions. Don't try to answer them before they are ready to be answered. Inhabit the uncertainty. This is not a comfortable instruction. It is an accurate one.

He died in December 1926 from leukemia brought on by an infection traced to a rose thorn. He had been cutting roses for a visitor when he pricked his finger. The wound became infected, and the infection became fatal within weeks. The most lyrical death in modern literary biography: the man who spent his life finding metaphors for mortality died of one.

For readers who know that solitude is not absence but a form of attention — and that the questions worth carrying are the ones that don't resolve quickly.