Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) studied literature, art history, and philosophy in both Munich and Prague and is often considered one of the German language's greatest twentieth-century poets. His two most famous verse sequences are the Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies; his two most famous prose works are Letters to a Young Poet and the semiautobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
Charlie Louth is a fellow at Queen's College, Oxford, where he lectures in German. He is the author of Hölderlin and the Dynamics of Translation.
Lewis Hyde is the author of the hundred-million-copy bestseller The Gift. A MacArthur fellow and former director of undergraduate creative writing at Harvard University, Hyde is a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Gambier, Ohio.
“For this reason, my dear Sir, the only advice I have is this: to
go into yourself and to examine the depths from which your life
springs; at its source you will find the answer to the question of
whether you have to write. Accept this answer as it is,without
seeking to interpret it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are
called to be an artist. Then assume this fate and bear it, its
burden and its greatness, without ever asking after the rewards
that may come from outside. For he who creates must be a world of
his own and find everything within himself and in the natural world
that he has elected to follow. [. . .] Whatever happens, your life
will find its own paths from that point on, and that they may be
good, productive and far-reaching is something I wish for you more
than I can say.” —Rainer Maria Rilke
“I cannot think of a better book to put into the hands of any young
would-be poet, as an inspirational guide to poetry and to surviving
as a poet in a hostile world.”
—Harry Fainlight, The Times (London)
“I read Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet every day.”
—Lady Gaga
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