Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague, 1875.  Beginning in his teenage years, he expressed his love, longing and pain in poetry, essays, even plays and a novel.  Suffering from leukemia at the end of his life, he wrote poems in French, having become disenchanted with the German language and culture after WWI.  He died at age 51, having written his last poem only days earlier.