Letters to a Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke
Genre: Poetry
Length: 80 Pages (Paperback)
Publication Date: January 1, 1929 / March 25, 2014 (Paperback)
Get More Info: Goodreads | Storygraph
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Publisher’s Description
Rainer Maria Rilke’s powerfully touching letters to an aspiring young poet.
At the start of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of letters to a young officer cadet, advising him on writing, love, sex, suffering, and the nature of advice itself. These profound and lyrical letters have since become hugely influential for generations of writers and artists of all kinds, including Lady Gaga and Patti Smith.
With honesty, elegance, and a deep understanding of the loneliness that often comes with being an artist, Rilke’s letters are an endless source of inspiration and comfort. Lewis Hyde’s new introduction explores the context in which these letters were written and how the author embraced his isolation as a creative force. This edition also includes Rilke’s later work The Letter from the Young Worker.
For more than 80 years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke is published by Penguin Classics / Dover Publications (Penguin Random House).
About Rainer Maria Rilke
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 by Rainer Maria Rilke 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 (Goodreads, 2025).
Read more about Rainer Maria Rilke here.
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