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“... time and again we go out two together,under the old trees … Rainer MariaRilke Not time and again, but – this being Ruby, my daughter aged six – just once. One typical Norfolk afternoon, as I recall it, In early summer, so that the oaks creaking in the hedgerows Were still ...”

“... whose lives were so single-mindedly dedicated to the pursuit of poetry as was the life of Rainer MariaRilke. Poetry was the centre and margin, ‘the field and hedgerows’, of his existence. The men whose friendships he cherished, the host of women admirers and aristocratic protectors he met and corresponded ...”

“... To read Donald Prater’s biography of Rilke in the hope of getting to know the poet in depth would be a tantalising exercise. Lack of information is not the problem. There is no shortage of documentary evidence available to the investigator and Prater has made full use of it. Rilke himself supplied his large share in letters of a princely egocentricity, upon which he appears to have lavished a formidable outlay of time and creative energy ...”

“... wonderfully hard-headed. But there can’t be a weirder or more unmanageable image than that of Rilke, the social and emotional butterfly, dreamy, hysterical, devoted to angels and children and the lure of death, perpetually stranded, it seems, in some angular Art Nouveau twilight, and yet capable of the sternest, strongest lines, mingling drastic common ...”

“... adored The Thousand and One Nights. ‘I got off lightly, she added. ‘My brother is called Rainer MariaRilke.’ I left on an early morning flight. An Indian, his back bent, a brush in each hand, was cleaning the streets. Waiting in Caracas for another plane I flicked through the guest book in the VIP ...”

“... truth. When you think of Yeats’s ‘Cast a cold Eye/On Life, on Death./Horseman, pass by!’ or Rilke’s (translated) ‘Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy/of being no one’s sleep under so many/lids’, the sheer peevishness, the withdrawal, the implicit self-adulation, the up-yours-even-unto-the-elbow-and-from-beyond-the-grave of these great ...”

“... of modern German literature generally. Similar qualms are voiced, a good deal more strongly, by Rainer MariaRilke, Kafka’s contemporary and fellow Prague German. In a letter of 11 January 1914 Rilke bitterly complains that the linguistic heritage to which he was born is ‘no ...”

“... sculptor Clara Westhoff, who studied with Rodin before Gwen met him, and married his secretary, Rainer MariaRilke. Modersohn-Becker died in 1907, aged 31, of complications after childbirth. Like John, she painted many portraits of women and many self-portraits; her subjects share with John’s a melancholy ...”

“... turn to Browning or Hopkins instead. It was, to be sure, easier to make these claims of, say, Rainer MariaRilke than of Anthony Trollope, not to speak of Shopping and Fucking. Like most theories of art, Romanticism and its heirs privileged one particular form of it – in this case, poetry, which had taken up ...”

“... a passionate admiration for things German. In one of her explosively brilliant love letters to Rainer MariaRilke she was to proclaim that, like all true poets, she wrote her own language, which was neither French, German nor Russian. Be that as it may, in her 1919 essay ‘O Germanii’ (‘On Germany’) she wrote ...”

“... One​ doesn’t think of Rainer MariaRilke writing poems on subjects that might otherwise appear in newspapers and books of social history – on anything like emigration or poverty or unemployment. Even by the standard of unworldly poets, he is like one of those cabinet ministers who doesn’t know the price of milk ...”

“... marriage. He had brought with him a long poem... A mile or so upstream from Sierre, at Muzot, was Rainer MariaRilke, whose Duino Elegies, held in suspension throughout the war, would soon miraculously complete themselves within a space of eight days. In Paris James Joyce awaited the publication of his Odyssey composed ...”

“... past, and people without much time left – the very old or the sick, like Katherine Mansfield and Rainer MariaRilke in Spring – are so often the bearers of enlightenment. They aren’t interested in sequence and story. Enlightenment happens only when now meets then, so arguably the crisis that has made next-door ...”

“... striking about his features’ (just as it does, incidentally, and with more justice, about Rainer MariaRilke: ‘features, not in themselves striking’) isn’t going to raise the bar for perspicacity or boldness. Accordingly, the human portraits are not among the best things here: the pages on Vienna, Paris ...”

“... the Tao Te Ching (now Dao De Jing), less well known than its supposed author Lao Tzu (now Laozi), Rainer MariaRilke (from German, French, or both?) and the Book of Job, Sefer Iiov, which I happen to know quite well but would never dare translate. In any case, Mitchell persuasively describes himself translating the ...”