Age ~23. Living in Berlin-Schmargendorf, Rilke makes his first journey to Russia in the spring with Lou Andreas-Salomé, an encounter with a vast, devout landscape that will haunt his work for years. The early Zwei Prager Geschichten (Two Stories of Prague) looks back to the city of his childhood; that autumn he drafts the Cornet in a single night.

Prose Two Stories of Prague 1899

Age ~24. A second Russian journey with Lou takes him as far as Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana. In late summer he settles at the artists' colony of Worpswede, on the northern moors, where he meets the sculptor Clara Westhoff and the painter Paula Becker. Geschichten vom lieben Gott (Stories of God) gives the Russian piety a storyteller's frame.

Prose Stories of God 1900

Age ~26. Married to Clara Westhoff and father to the infant Ruth, Rilke publishes Die Letzten (The Last Ones) and then leaves the moors for Paris to write a study of Auguste Rodin. The meeting with Rodin — and the injunction to look, to work like a craftsman — reorients his art from feeling toward the observed thing; the first Buch der Bilder also appears.

Prose The Last Ones 1902

Age ~29. Now living near Rodin at Meudon and serving for a time as the old sculptor's secretary, Rilke sees Das Stunden-Buch (The Book of Hours) into print with Insel — the great early cycle of prayers, begun amid the Russian journeys, in the voice of a monk addressing a near and growing God.

poem The Book of Hours 1905

Age ~30. Rodin abruptly dismisses him, and his father dies; the enlarged second edition of Das Buch der Bilder (The Book of Images) appears, its poems turning outward to dusk, autumn, blindness, and the figures of the street. The lesson of Rodin's hands is beginning to harden his looking.

poem The Book of Images 1906

Age ~31. The breakthrough year: Neue Gedichte (New Poems) collects the 'thing-poems' — the panther, the gazelle, archaic torsos — in which Rilke makes the poem a made object after Rodin's craft and Cézanne's color, whose memorial exhibition he visits again and again that autumn. The expanded Auguste Rodin essay appears alongside.

Prose Auguste Rodin 1907 poem New Poems 1907

Age ~32. Der neuen Gedichte anderer Teil (New Poems: The Other Part), dedicated to Rodin, completes the project of seeing — poems that hold an object until it yields its inner law. Rilke is living in Paris, for a while in the Hôtel Biron.

poem New Poems: The Other Part 1908

Age ~34. Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge), his only novel, is finished after long labor — a young Dane's anxious, fragmentary reckoning with death, fear, and the modern city. The effort nearly empties him; a difficult, largely silent decade follows.

Prose The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge 1910

Age ~36. A guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis at Duino Castle above the Adriatic, Rilke hears in a January wind the first line of what will become the Duineser Elegien and writes the opening elegies — then the work breaks off, stalled by inner drought and soon by the war. The popular Insel edition of the Cornet (written 1899) makes his name widely known.

poem The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke 1912

Age ~37. Das Marien-Leben (The Life of the Virgin Mary), a quiet cycle on the Gospel scenes, and Erste Gedichte (Early Poems), gathering the youthful verse, appear as he travels restlessly across Europe in the last seasons before the war closes the borders.

poem The Life of the Virgin Mary 1913 poem Early Poems 1913

Age ~47. After ten years and the war, in a few overwhelming days of February 1922 at the Château de Muzot in Switzerland, Rilke completes the Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies) and, almost at once, writes the whole of the Sonette an Orpheus (Sonnets to Orpheus). Insel publishes both in 1923 — the summit of his work, finished as if dictated. He will die of leukemia three years later.

poem Duino Elegies 1923 poem The Sonnets to Orpheus 1923