[1] His work is viewed by critics and scholars as possessing undertones of mysticism, exploring themes of subjective experience and disbelief.

Among English-language readers, his best-known works include two poetry collections: Duino Elegies (Duineser Elegien) and Sonnets to Orpheus (Die Sonette an Orpheus), a semi-autobiographical novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge), and a collection of ten letters published posthumously Letters to a Young Poet (Briefe an einen jungen Dichter).

In the later 20th century, his work found new audiences in citations by self-help authors[5][6][7] and frequent quotations in television shows, books and motion pictures.

His mother, Sophie ("Phia") Entz (1851–1931), was from a well-to-do family in Prague, the Entz-Kinzelbergers, who lived at Herrengasse (Panská) 8, where René spent many of his early years.

His parents enrolled the poetically and artistically talented youth in a military academy in Sankt Pölten, Lower Austria.

[14] Rilke met and fell in love with the widely travelled and intellectual woman of letters Lou Andreas-Salomé in 1897 in Munich.

Between May and August 1900, a second journey to Russia, accompanied only by Lou, again took him to Moscow and Saint Petersburg, where he met the family of Boris Pasternak and Spiridon Drozhzhin, a peasant poet.

Author Anna A. Tavis cites the cultures of Bohemia and Russia as the key influences on Rilke's poetry and consciousness.

At the same time his encounter with modernism was very stimulating: Rilke became deeply involved with the sculpture of Rodin and then the work of Paul Cézanne.

Rodin taught him the value of objective observation and, under this influence, Rilke dramatically transformed his poetic style from the subjective and sometimes incantatory language of his earlier work into something quite new in European literature.

[17] During the later part of this decade, Rilke spent extended periods in Ronda, the famous bullfighting centre in southern Spain, where he kept a permanent room at the Hotel Reina Victoria from December 1912 to February 1913.

The outward motive was an invitation to lecture in Zurich, but the real reason was the wish to escape the post-war chaos and take up his work on the Duino Elegies once again.

Muzot has received its musical christening..."[23][24][25] From 1923 on, Rilke increasingly struggled with health problems that necessitated many long stays at a sanatorium in Territet near Montreux on Lake Geneva.

Despite this, numerous important individual poems appeared in the years 1923–1926 (including Gong and Mausoleum), as well as his abundant lyrical work in French.

[33] He developed a reputation for supporting left-wing causes and thus, out of fear for his own safety, became more reticent about politics after the Bavarian Republic was crushed by the right-wing Freikorps.

[33] In January and February 1926, Rilke wrote three letters to the Mussolini-adversary Aurelia Gallarati Scotti in which he praised Benito Mussolini and described fascism as a healing agent.

[37] Rilke had chosen as his own epitaph this poem: Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch, Lust, Niemandes Schlaf zu sein unter soviel Lidern.

[38] Rilke's three complete cycles of poems that constitute The Book of Hours (Das Stunden-Buch) were published by Insel Verlag in April 1905.

The narrative takes the form of a rambling novelette filled with poetic language and contains, among other things, a retelling of the prodigal son tale, a striking description of death by illness, an ode to the joys of roaming free during childhood, a chilling description of how people wear false faces with others, and a snarky comment about the weirdness of neighbors.

He was inspired by Sigbjørn Obstfelder's work A Priest's Diary and Jens Peter Jacobsen's novel Niels Lyhne (1880) which traces the fate of an atheist in a merciless world.

He combines these techniques and motifs to conjure images of mankind's anxiety and alienation in the face of an increasingly scientific, industrial and reified world.

Rilke began writing the elegies in 1912 while a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis (1855–1934) at Duino Castle, near Trieste on the Adriatic Sea.

During this ten-year period, the elegies languished incomplete for long stretches of time as Rilke suffered frequently from severe depression, some of which was caused by the events of World War I and his conscripted military service.

With a sudden, renewed inspiration – writing in a frantic pace he described as "a savage creative storm" – he completed the collection in February 1922 while staying at Château de Muzot in Veyras, in Switzerland's Rhône Valley.

[43] While labelling of these poems as "elegies" would typically imply melancholy and lamentation, many passages are marked by their positive energy and "unrestrained enthusiasm".

[44] With news of the death of Wera Knoop (1900–1919), his daughter's friend, Rilke was inspired to create and set to work on Sonnets to Orpheus.

These letters offer insight into the ideas and themes that appear in Rilke's poetry and his working process and were written during a key period of Rilke's early artistic development after his reputation as a poet began to be established with the publication of parts of Das Stunden-Buch (The Book of Hours) and Das Buch der Bilder (The Book of Images).

Figures from Greek mythology, such as Apollo, Hermes and Orpheus, recur as motifs in his poems and are depicted in original interpretations that often double as analogies for his experiences.

[6][54] Rilke's work has influenced several poets and writers, including William H. Gass,[55] Galway Kinnell,[56] Sidney Keyes,[57][58] Stephen Spender,[40] Robert Bly,[40][59] W. S. Merwin,[60] John Ashbery,[61] novelist Thomas Pynchon[62] and the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer.

[63][64] British poet W. H. Auden (1907–1973) has been described as "Rilke's most influential English disciple" and he frequently "paid homage to him" or used the imagery of angels in his work.