property on their behalf. In July 1921, Rilke and Klossowska had moved in. Later, Reinhart bought the property and turned it over to Rilke for life. During the summer of 1921, Rilke's daughter Ruth became engaged. In December, he sent a letter to Gertrud Ouckama Knoop, widow of his deceased friend and mother of the dancer Wera Ouckama Knoop, who was once a friend of Ruth's, announcing the engagement. In turn, Gertrud sent an account of Wera's death at age 19 that moved Rilke to compose the Sonnets to Orpheus and complete the Duino Elegies. Rilke wrote that Wera's image dominates and moves the Sonnets. They frequently refer to her, directly addressing her by name and indirectly through allusions to a dancer or the mythical Eurydice. Rilke composed in a rush of inspiration: writing nearly all the poems of Part I of the Sonnets between 2–5 February 1922, completing the Duino Elegies between 7–15 February, and completing the remaining poems of Sonnets between 16–22 February. Rilke saw the creation of the Sonnets and Elegies as a twin birth. In the midst of his writing, Rilke wrote Klossowska: "That which weighed upon and tortured me is accomplished ... but never within my heart and mind have I borne such a hurricane. I am still trembling from it ... And I went out to caress this old Muzot, just now, in the moonlight." Immediately after completing the Elegies, he wrote Lou Andreas-Salomé that he had finished "all in a few days; it was a hurricane, as at Duino that time: all that was fiber, fabric in me, framework, cracked and bent." Publication and reception Duino Elegies, which is 859 lines long, was published by Insel-Verlag in Leipzig in 1923. Prominent critics praised the work and compared its merits to the works of Hölderlin and Goethe. During the 1920s, many of the younger generation of poets and writers did not like Duino Elegies because of the poems' obscure symbols and philosophy. The poet , who is associated with the literary circle of Stefan George, dismissed the poems as "mystical blather" and described their "secular theology" as "impotent gossip". Novelist Hermann Hesse describes Rilke as evolving into his best poetry with the Duino Elegies, that "at each stage now and again the miracle occurs, his delicate, hesitant, anxiety-prone person withdraws, and through him resounds the music of the universe; like the basin of a