Which poet wrote 'The Duino Elegies'?

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote The Duino Elegies, a cycle of ten intensely philosophical poems first published in 1923. Written in German, the collection examines mortality, loneliness, love, beauty, suffering, and the difficult task of being human.

Rilke began the poems in 1912 while staying at Duino Castle on the Adriatic coast as a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis. He completed only fragments for several years, with the project interrupted by depression, World War I, and military service. In February 1922, while living at Château de Muzot in Switzerland, he experienced a burst of creativity and completed the cycle along with the Sonnets to Orpheus.

Although the title suggests traditional poems of mourning, the elegies are not simply laments. Their angels are overwhelming, almost terrifying beings, and the poems repeatedly contrast their imagined perfection with human fragility and consciousness. The work is often grouped with major twentieth-century European poetry, but Rilke’s authorship is unambiguous; Friedrich Hölderlin and Paul Celan were influential German-language poets from different generations, not authors of this collection.