Austro-German poet Rainer Maria Rilke was BOTD in 1875. Born in Prague, then part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, his parents separated when he was a child and he was sent to military school, before being rescued by an uncle and given an academic education. He attended Karls-Universität, published his first poems while still a student, leaving before his graduation to pursue a writing career. He travelled extensively through Europe and Russia, settling in an artist’s colony in Germany with his wife Clara Westhoff, with whom he had a child. In 1902 he moved alone to Paris to write a biography of sculptor Auguste Rodin, eventually becoming Rodin’s secretary. Via Rodin, he befriended a largely gay artistic milieu including André Gide, Sergei Diaghilev, Vaslav Nijinsky, and Jean Cocteau. During World War One, he served briefly in the Austrian Army, before moving to Switzerland, where he produced his most famous poetry cycles, Duineser Elegien (The Duino Elegies) and Sonette an Orpheus (Sonnets to Orpheus). After suffering from tuberculosis for many years, he died in 1926, aged 51. A prolific correspondent, many of his letters and poetic collaborations were published after his death, notably his letters to aspiring writer Franz Xaver Kappus, collated in the bestselling Briefe an einen jungen Dichter (Letters to a Young Poet) and his Briefwechsel in Gedichten with the poet Erika Mitterer. Despite his lifelong obsession with women, many of Rilke’s friends (including Cocteau and Harold Nicholson) nursed theories that Rilke was bisexual, a question still debated by his biographers. His work became hugely influential on 20th century Modernist literature, notably in the poetry of W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and John Ashbery.