Extensive travels took him to Russia; various parts of Europe, including Italy, Spain, and parts of Scandinavia; and northern Africa, including Morocco and Egypt. With the outbreak of World War I, Rilke was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army. After an initial burst of enthusiasm for the war (Rilke was no pacifist but believed in the occasional necessity of military intervention to secure peace), he sought help from well-placed friends who eventually secured a writing assignment for him at a safe remove from the front. During this period, his poetic writing all but ceased. Rilke had been forced to leave Paris as an enemy-citizen with no time to plan and no certainty of a return date; he lost all of his belongings with the exception of two trunks filled with papers that André Gide tracked down and secured for him until after the war. He shuttled between Munich and Vienna waiting for his draft notification and then, after his service, for his army release. A photograph from this time shows the poet’s large head as a gaunt, frozen mask with a look of resignation as if there were nothing left in the world that could elicit a response from him. For Rilke, this state of emotional numbness was the worst possible fate; his true compassion (and self-pity) always extended to those for whom the world had ceased to provide a new experience.

Rilke left Germany in 1919 and never again set foot in the country where he enjoyed the greatest reputation. His books were published there, but he felt deep ambivalence toward Germany and held it responsible for the devastating war and its aftermath. “How very much I hate this people [the Germans] . . . Nobody will ever be able to claim that I write in their language!” Rilke writes, in German, on January 1, 1923. Aside from translations during the war years, Rilke largely stopped writing poetry until 1922, when wealthy patrons bought and modestly restored a somewhat dilapidated, small stone cottage (though bearing the title “château”) in Switzerland where he could recover from the war years’ psychic wounds. He also fell in love again, and again, and then another time—for many women, Rilke proved utterly irresistible, and often he chose not to put up any defenses. In 1912—a decade earlier— Rilke had begun writing his Duino Elegies in the old castle of Duino, near Trieste, on the rugged northern Italian coast owned by his close friends, the prince and princess of Thurn and Taxis. In 1923, Rilke finished the Elegies and wrote his Sonnets to Orpheus in a burst of exceptional creativity over a two-week period in February in the tower of Muzot. Muzot had become more than a safe haven: it was now the temple where his greatest poetic creation was conceived, and Switzerland would be the place of refuge from which he would never again leave. Rilke completed the ten long Elegies (an additional eleventh elegy was ultimately excluded) in eight days and wrote the first twenty-five poems in Sonnets to Orpheus between February 2 and February 5, 1923, and then completed the fifty-five-poem cycle, in addition to a series of uncollected poems, in another ten days one week later. Even some of Rilke’s detractors grudgingly conceded that in the case of Rilke’s self-described “hurricane of most intense abilities,” during which the Elegies and Sonnets had been written, the “bourgeois myth” of the inspired genius for once held true.

Biographers have seized on the absence of publications during the war years, until the completion of the Elegies, to portray Rilke as a sickly, suffering figure too fragile and too pure for this world. But Rilke was not silent by any means between 1914 and 1922. For nearly a decade, he had refined his language and his thinking by writing countless—probably over a thousand—letters that opened up the space where the poems could gestate. Much more than mere notes to his poems, Rilke’s letters reveal the movement of his thought before it is condensed and compacted into metaphor and verse. When Rilke looked back at the war years in 1925, he reflected on the “grace” of having preserved his own ability to write poetry as a sign of everyone’s capacity to be rescued from the blows dealt by fate: this grace is “more than only a private experience because it constitutes a measure for the inexhaustible layering of our nature that, by proving that it may be possible to continue, could peculiarly console many who had considered themselves internally devastated for different reasons.” This sense of having overcome great adversity informs all of his letters. They offer eloquent proof that his wartime silence was only partial and constitute a significant and substantive “layer” of Rilke’s nature.

From 1922 until his death from leukemia in 1926, Rilke lived in relative seclusion in Switzerland for long periods between friends’ visits, short trips, and spells of illness. When Paul Valéry, whom Rilke revered and whose style he emulated in a late collection of poems written in French, visited Rilke’s tower he was bewildered how anyone could choose to live in such isolation. Rilke maintained his frequent correspondence with literally hundreds of people while in Switzerland and kept on writing even through the increasingly severe pain of his undiagnosed cancer. His patrons and supporters, ranging from Europe’s aristocrats to industrialists, businessmen, and heirs of trading fortunes, professed a seemingly unshakable faith in his capacity to produce; their occasional worries about lavishing money on a poet who failed to publish a book for over a decade and who had a habit of staying for extended periods in hotels he could not at all afford, are directly addressed and alleviated in Rilke’s letters. Most of these letters are so personal and lucid that one imagines the mere arrival of such well-put wisdom to be sufficient recompense for the money Rilke received. Indeed, all of his correspondents realized that with each letter they were given something that would far outlast anything bought with their money (which did not keep some of them from putting these letters on the auction block before Rilke was dead).