From Notebooks and Personal Papers

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is recognized as one of the great poets of 20th century European modernism. From 1921-1926, he lived in southern Switzerland, in a region called the Valais. Following the completion of the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke began to work in both French and German. A collection of French poems addressed to the landscape of Valais, Quatrains Valaisans, was published in 1926. In May of that same year, Rilke sent his publishers an arrangement of German la...