Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague, then part of Austria-Hungary, and was sent as a boy to military schools, which he hated. He left to study and to write, and by his twenties he was traveling restlessly across Europe, living in borrowed rooms and the houses of admirers, with poetry as his only fixed address.

In 1902 he went to Paris to write a book about the sculptor Auguste Rodin, and later worked for a time as Rodin’s secretary. Rodin taught him something he had not learned from poets: to work every day, and to look at things until they gave up their secrets. Rilke began writing what he called “thing-poems,” close studies of a panther in its cage at the zoo, a flamingo, an archaic statue of Apollo. The Apollo poem ends with one of the most famous lines in modern poetry: “You must change your life.”

Around the same time, a nineteen-year-old military cadet named Franz Xaver Kappus sent Rilke some of his poems and asked for his opinion. Rilke wrote back, and over the next five years sent him ten letters. He did not say much about Kappus’s poems. Instead he told him to stop looking outward for approval, to ask himself in the quietest hour of the night whether he must write, and, if the answer was yes, to build his life around that necessity. He told him to be patient with everything unresolved in his heart, and to try to love the questions themselves. After Rilke’s death, Kappus published the letters, and they have been read by young writers ever since.

In 1912, staying at Duino Castle on the Adriatic coast, Rilke heard a line in the wind and began a sequence of elegies. Then he could not finish them. For ten years, through war and wandering, they waited. In February 1922, in a small stone tower in Switzerland, they came all at once, along with the fifty-five Sonnets to Orpheus, in a few weeks of writing he called a storm. He died of leukemia in 1926.