Selected Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Rilke is perhaps the most famous of all twentieth-century European poets. He was born in Prague in 1875 but much of his life is characterized by a restless wandering which brought him into contact with some of the greatest figures of the age, among them Lou Andreas-Salome, Tolstoy, Rodin and Cezanne. He died in Switzerland in 1926. With two exceptions this selection is made exclusively from the five volumes of letters published by the Inselverlag up to 1935, covering the period 1902 to 1926. (from book's Notes)

404 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1926

About the author

A mystic lyricism and precise imagery often marked verse of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose collections profoundly influenced 20th-century German literature and include The Book of Hours (1905) and The Duino Elegies (1923).

People consider him of the greatest 20th century users of the language.

His haunting images tend to focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety — themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.

His two most famous sequences include the Sonnets to Orpheus , and his most famous prose works include the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge .

He also wrote more than four hundred poems in French, dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland, his homeland of choice.