Georg Trakl

Austrian lyric poet whose work centered on death, disaster and decay. His work as an expressionist poet had a formative influence on his period.

In 1905 Trakl left high school and began apprenticeship with a chemist. He studied pharmaceuticals in Vienna, entering the university in September 1908. In 1910 he was conscripted into the Austrian Army Medical Corps for a year. He worked as a pharmacist but was drinking excessively and could never keep a job. Remaining an outsider, he was an alcoholic and chloroform user. When young, he had had an incestuous relationship with his sister, who committed suicide in 1914.

Trakl himself was a suicide, dying of a cocaine overdose that paralyzed his heart on the evening of the 3 November 1914, Krakow, Poland.