Rainer Maria Rilke

German-language lyric poet who is among the greatest poets of the 20th century — creating an intensely personal poetry that confronts mortality, the angel, the invisible, and the transformation of experience into art.

Duino Elegies: ten elegies wrestling with the angel, human inadequacy before the transcendent, and the task of transformation — perhaps the most demanding lyric sequence in German. Sonnets to Orpheus: the poet as transformer — the task is to transform transient experience into invisible, permanent form. Letters to a Young Poet: a small masterpiece of wisdom on the creative life. New Poems: Dinggedichte — poems that render things from the inside.