This is a translation of Rilke's SELECTED NEW POEMS done by a German scholar and poet, Alice Derry. Derry herself has spent years studying Rilke, and has lived and worked in Germany.

In der berühmten Versdichtung "Sonette an Orpheus" zeichnet Rainer Maria Rilke die Lebensgeschichte des mythischen Sängers Orpheus nach. Eindringlich, poetisch, leidenschaftlich: Die Gedichte haben bis heute nichts von ihrem großen Reiz und ihrer intensiven Wirkung verloren.

Edward Snow's selection of more than one hundred of Rainer Maria Rilke's little-known and neglected poems in this bilingual edition offers the reader a glimpse into one of the most powerful and underrated accomplishments in all of modern poetry. The poems in Uncollected Poems reveal a freer, more dangerous, less self-fashioning Rilke than the poet of the Elegies and the Sonnets; and Snow's translations of them, while always scrupulously faithful to...

The formative work of the legendary poet who sought to write "not feelings but things I had felt" When Rainer Maria Rilke arrived in Paris for the first time in September 1902, commissioned by a German publisher to write a monograph on Rodin, he was twenty-seven and already the author of nine books of poems. His early work had been accomplished, but belonged tonally to the impressionistic, feeling-centered world of a late-nineteenth-century aesthetic. Paris...

Rainer Maria Rilke's move to Paris in 1902 and his close association with Rodin led him to take a new direction in his poetry. Between 1906 and 1908 he produced a torrent of brilliant work that was published in two separate volumes under the title Neue Gedichte, or New Poems. As the celebrated Rilke translator Edward Snow observes, these books "together constitute one of the great instances of the lyric quest for objective experience." Here is the...

Born in Prague when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and recognized today as a master of verse, poet Rainer Maria Rilke was considerably less well known in 1902 when he received a heartfelt letter from an aspiring poet. A 19-year-old student sent Rilke some of his verses, seeking an opinion of their worth. Rilke declined to offer a critique, instead encouraging the student to rely upon his own inner judgment: "Nobody can advise and help...

How these letters came to be, written is, told by their recipient in his introduction, and to this there would be nothing to add were it not for the close of the eighth letter: Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness...Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words." It is evident that a great artist,...

Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry and letters have inspired countless readers around the world with their wisdom and insight into how we can be more than ourselves without recourse to religion, politics, or ideology: through the experiences of art and love. Gathered here for the first time in original translations are Rilke's candid, piercing, and lyrical reflections on love-the experience he considered paramount for human existence but also, with the exception...

Rainer Maria Rilke, one of Germany's greatest poets, began this work in 1912, at the castle of Duino near Trieste. It took him a decade to complete these meditations on love, death, God, and life's meaning, and he regarded them as his greatest achievement. Innovative and enigmatic, they express his irresolvable conflict between a longing for solitude and a painful loneliness. The elegies' enduring popularity attests to their vivid reflection of the...

Rainer Maria Rilke is perhaps the most import German poet. His powerful and lyrical poetry has captured generations of readers. Both mystical and compelling his influence cannot be overstated. Collected here are more than 40 poems, full of beauty and mastery of language. It's not hard to see why Rilke remains one of the most popular and best selling poets to this very day.