"If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow"
— Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)
Rilke is often regarded as the most significant poet in the German language. Born in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Rilke was sent to military school, but rebelled and studied the humanities at university. He became the protégé, and some say lover, of Lou Andreas-Salome, an older intellectual woman, and traveled extensively with her including a visit to Tolstoy. He settled in Paris after the turn of the century, writing much of his best work there including his Requiem poems. He later lived in Trieste and then Zurich where he continued his deep examination of the nature of life and death. In 1922 he finished his best known work, the Duino Elegies. He died of leukemia at 51.
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Good Morning Gloucester 
Love Rilke. Did you know that the title of my book Each Angel Burns is a quote from Rilke?
Who, if I cried, would hear me, of the angelic
orders? or even supposing that one should suddenly
carry me to his heart – I should perish under the pressure
of his stronger nature. For beauty is only a step
removed from a burning terror we barely sustain,
and we worship it for the graceful sublimity
with which it disdains to consume us. Each angel burns.
– Ranier Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies
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