pThe Duino Elegies German Duineser Elegien are a collection of ten elegies written by the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke 1875-1926. Rilke, who is widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets, began writing the elegies in 1912 while a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis 1855-1934 at Duino Castle, near Trieste on the Adriatic Sea. The poems, 859 lines long in total, 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 suffered frequently from severe depression--some of which was caused by the events of World War I and being conscripted into military service. Aside from brief episodes of writing in 1913 and 1915, Rilke did not return to the work until a few years after the war ended. With a sudden, renewed inspiration--writing in a frantic pace he described as a boundless storm, a hurricane of the spirit--he completed the collectio