A mystic lyricism and precise imagery often marked verse of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose collections profoundly influenced 20th-century German literature and include The Book of Hours (1905) and The Duino Elegies (1923).
People consider him of the greatest 20th century users of the language.
His haunting images tend to focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety — themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.
Rilke encourages taking every little feeling, every confusing monolith and being— considering it joy, and elevating pressure off of understanding it completely from the beginning, since “we’re all apprentices” at everything “important”— which is everything that we get emotionally invested in. The book features a fantastic epilogue from Mood which questions, and shares the same feeling of myself after reading it— “was this all just one big beginning?” Maybe this is the beginning to another beginning? And for one, “beginnings [are] perhaps the most difficult thing of all.” Thank you Aunt Luna for recommending this masterpiece to me.