"Rainer Maria Rilke, one of Germany's greatest poets, began this work in 1912, at the castle of Duino near Trieste. It took him a decade to complete these meditations on love, death, God, and life's meaning, and he regarded them as his greatest achievement. Innovative and enigmatic, they express his irresolvable conflict between a longing for solitude and a painful loneliness. The elegies' enduring popularity attests to their vivid reflection of the human condition, in all its joy, terror, sorrow, and splendor."--back cover.