Poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke

The Sonnets to Orpheus (German: Die Sonette an Orpheus) are a cycle of 55 sonnets written in 1922 by the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926). It was first published the following year. Rilke, who is "widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets," wrote the cycle in a period of three weeks experiencing what he described a "savage creative storm." Inspired by the news of the death of Wera Ouckama Knoop (1900–1919), a playmate of Rilke's daughter Ruth, he dedicated them as a memorial, or Grab-Mal (literally "grave-marker"), to her memory.

The Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke is a prose poem written by Rainer Maria Rilke in 1899, revised in 1906, and published in 1912. Rilke wrote the poem after finding a document in his uncle Jaroslav's papers concerning Christopher Rilke, a man who Rainer's family erroneously believed to be an ancestor and who "died as a cornet in the baron of Pirovano's company of the Imperial Austrian Heyster Regiment of Horse." The poem recounts the adventures of Christopher Rilke, who travels with a company of soldiers and then, after a night in a castle with a lover, fights and dies in a war in Turkey and is mourned by an old woman.

The Book of Images (German: Das Buch der Bilder) is a collection of poetry by the Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). It was first published in 1902 by Axel Juncker Verlag.

The Duino Elegies (German: Duineser Elegien) are a collection of ten elegies written by the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. He was then "widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets", and began the elegies in 1912 while a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis at Duino Castle on the Adriatic Sea. The poems were dedicated to the Princess upon their publication in 1923. During this ten-year period, the elegies languished incomplete for long stretches of time as Rilke had frequent bouts with severe depression—some of which were related to the events of World War I and being conscripted into military service. Aside from brief periods of writing in 1913 and 1915, he did not return to the work until a few years after the war ended. With a sudden, renewed burst of frantic writing which he described as a "boundless storm, a hurricane of the spirit"—he completed the collection in February 1922 while staying at Château de Muzot in Veyras, Switzerland. After their publication in 1923, the Duino Elegies were soon recognized as his most important work.

"The Panther" (subtitled: "In Jardin des Plantes, Paris"; German: Der Panther: Im Jardin des Plantes, Paris) is a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke written between 1902 and 1903. It describes a captured panther behind bars, as it was exhibited in the Ménagerie of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. It is one of Rilke's most famous poems and has been translated into English many times, including by many distinguished translators of Rilke, like Stephen Mitchell, C. F. MacIntyre, J. B. Leishman and Walter Arndt, Jessie Lamont and poets like Robert Bly. It is used in the film Awakenings (1990) by the protagonist Leonard Lowe as a metaphor for his physical disability.

The Book of Hours (German: Das Stunden-Buch) is a collection of poetry by the Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926). The collection was written between 1899 and 1903 in three parts, and first published in Leipzig by Insel Verlag in April 1905. With its dreamy, melodic expression and neo-Romantic mood, it stands, along with The Lay of the Love and Death of Christoph Cornet, as the most important of his early works.

New Poems (German: Neue Gedichte) is a two-part collection of poems written by Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926). The first volume, dedicated to Elisabeth and Karl von der Heydt was composed from 1902 to 1907 and was published in the same year by Insel Verlag in Leipzig. The second volume (New Poems: The Other Part), dedicated to Auguste Rodin, was completed in 1908 and published by the same publisher. With the exception of eight poems written in Capri, Rilke composed most of them in Paris and Meudon. At the start of each volume he placed, respectively, Früher Apollo (Early Apollo) and Archaïscher Torso Apollos (Archaic Torso of Apollo), poems about sculptures of the poet-God.