“It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.” -- Rainer Maria Rilke (1875- 1926), the Austrian-Bohemian poet whose poetry and prose influenced the likes of W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Thomas Pynchon among others. Mystical and occasionally drawing on Greek mythology, Rilke is recognized as one of the first modernist writers.
(image: detail of Rilke's portrait by Leonid Pasternak)
