Rainer Maria Rilke began writing his Duino Elegies in January 1912 at Duino Castle, a medieval fortress on the Adriatic coast near Trieste, where he was a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis. According to legend, Rilke heard the opening line — 'Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the orders of angels?' — borne to him by the wind from the castle's battlements above the sea. He completed the cycle of ten elegies only in 1922 at Muzot, a medieval tower in the Swiss Valais.

The Duino Elegies are among the greatest poems of the twentieth century, and their origin in a castle on a cliff above the sea — where Rilke heard angelic voices in the wind — makes them the supreme example of the fortification as a site of visionary poetic inspiration. The castle gave Rilke the image of the imperilled, isolated human creature exposed to cosmic forces, an image that runs through all ten elegies. Together with Yeats's tower poems, the Duino Elegies made the medieval fortification the defining architectural symbol of Modernist poetry.