For Stefan George and Rainer Maria Rilke, the year 1900 was to mark the midpoint in their respective lives. Having then just achieved artistic maturity, Rilke would undergo an astonishing evolution as a thinker and writer, creating such disparate yet related works as the Neue Gedichte (1907), Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), Duineser Elegien (1923), and Die Sonette an Orpheus (1923). By contrast, remarkable constancy within a closely controlled range of ideas and styles characterizes George's three major books of poetry after 1900: Der Siebente Ring (1907), Der Stern des Bundes (1913), and Das Neue Reich (1928). Rilke was embarking on a spiritual journey that would lead him from mastery of the aesthetics and ethics of representation to a visionary poetic philosophy that embraced the world as life and death (Brodsky 37). George, for his part, had fixed upon a new faith that divinity was immanent and potentially incarnate in the present moment. Whereas for Rilke all being yearns to be transformed, George, like Plato, insisted that ideal forms have metaphysical permanence, however changeable earthly phenomena may seem. Rilke urged humanity to glory in mortality and affirm Earth's wisdom in granting us life and taking it away. George, on the other hand, demanded that mankind restore archetypal social and cultural ideals to prove worthy of an unending heroic destiny that he saw figured forth in the stars.