Sonnets to Orpheus

The Sonnets to Orpheus, known in German as Die Sonette an Orpheus, is a cycle of fifty-five sonnets by the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, written in German in 1922 and published in 1923. Rilke composed the cycle in an intense burst of creativity he described as a savage creative storm lasting about three weeks, writing it as a memorial to Wera Ouckama Knoop, a young dancer and friend of his daughter who had recently died, and completing it in the same extraordinary period in which he also finished his Duino Elegies. The sonnets take the mythical poet-musician Orpheus as their recurring figure, using his story to meditate on transformation, loss, art and the relationship between the living and the dead. Together with the Duino Elegies, the Sonnets to Orpheus is regarded as one of the two summit achievements of Rilke's poetic career and among the major works of twentieth-century German-language poetry.