Rilke

As an ambitious young poet, Rilke was chastised by his elder, Stefan George: "You've started to publish too early." Damning words! Rilke had authored seven volumes of poetry before The Book of Hours, his 1905 breakthrough, and repudiated them later in life, by which time he had grown tired of the publishing marketplace altogether and taken to circulating his poems mainly among friends (Constantine Cavafy, another poet whose mature work spanned the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was doing the same in Alexandria). Rilke turned from writing fashionable Jugendstil lyrics about maidens to producing inimitable meditations on the philosophical subjects of perceiving, knowing and being. For this he was rewarded with episodes of so-called dictation, culminating in February 1922, when he "received" a complement of Duino Elegies, which he had begun a decade before, and a new cycle, Sonnets to Orpheus.