“Society in its wisdom has found ways of constructing refuges of all kinds, for since it has been disposed to make the love-life a pastime, it has also felt obliged to trivialize it, to make it cheap, risk-free and secure, as public pleasures usually are.”

Austrian poet

Rainer Maria Rilke was an Austrian poet and major German-language writer. He is remembered for writing with a distinctive, highly expressive voice, and for work that critics have often read as marked by mysticism. His writing explores subjective experience and doubt, and it spans poetry, one novel, several volumes of correspondence, and a few early novellas. These pieces helped establish his reputation as a writer whose language is intimate, reflective, and inward-looking.