One of the twentieth century's great originals, Rilke's poetry stands beside the philosophy of Nietzsche and the sculpture of Rodin. These pages clearly reflect the development of his art from the early exploration of love and death, anguish and ecstasy, to the more precise poetry of his later period, acutely aware of a sense of alienated terror. This bilingual edition contains the full text of his Duino Elegies, complete with an appendix of fragments, alongside generous selections from The Sonnets to Orpheus and the earlier volumes of poetry. 'Excellent ...it is easy to feel that if Rilke had written in English, he would have written in this English' New York Times Book Review

Author Biography

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926) is one of the greatest German-language poets of the twentieth century, famed for his lyrical intensity. Born in Prague in 1875, Rilke travelled extensively throughout Europe at the turn of the twentieth century and became deeply involved in the Modernist movement, working with the sculptor Auguste Rodin. His most famous poems are Sonnets to Orpheus and The Duino Elegies, and in prose he is most remembered for Letters to a Young Poet and The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. He died of leukemia in Switzerland on 29 December 1926.