Czech poet born in Prague, Czech Republic, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, one of the greatest expressions of poetry from the first decades of the 20th century, alongside names such as Ambroise Paul Valéry (1871-1945) and Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965).
After living a lonely and emotionally conflicted childhood, he studied at military schools and attended the University of Prague (1895-1896), after Munich and Berlin, but he did not graduate, preferring to travel around Europe and living off people who admired him, mainly women.
He was in Munich (1896) and met (1897) the daughter of a Russian general Lou Andreas-Salomé, with whom he traveled to Russia (1899-1900) as a lover and guide to his native country. He changed his first name to Rainer, married (1901) the sculptor Clara Westhoff, but soon separated and, the following year he went to Paris, and was secretary (1905-1906) of the sculptor René Auguste Rodin (1840-1917).
Rodin taught him to contemplate the work of art as a religious activity and to make verses as consistent and complete as if they were sculptures. He lived (1910-1913) in the castle of Duino, near Trieste, as a guest of Princess Maria von Thurn und Taxis, where he began writing Duineser Elegien or Elegia de Duino. He resided in Munich for most of World War I and was in the Austrian Army (1916). After a tour of the Mediterranean countries, he settled in Switzerland and died in Valmont, near Montreux.
Among poems and books, his work Das Buch der Bilder (1902), Stundenbuch (1905), the two volumes by Neue Gedichte (1907-1908), Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte stood out. Laurids Brigge (1910), his most important prose work, and his two masterpieces, Duineser Elegien (1923) and Sonette an Orpheus (1923) and the posthumous Briefe an einen jungen Dichter (1929). In Duineser Elegien (1923), a certain approximation of the existential philosophical concepts of Sören Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was perceived.
Source: http://www.dec.ufcg.edu.br/biografias/
Order R - Biography - Brazil School