Rainer Maria Rilke was described by another great poet, Maria Tsvetaeva, as 'not a poet, but the embodiment of poetry'. His work spans the divide between Europe's turn-of-the-century decadence and its post First World War revolutionary modernism, always struggling to develop, to seek and reach beyond itself.

This bilingual selection gathers poems from all periods of Rilke's life and artistic development but, instead of arranging them chronologically, places poems of similar themes or modes of expression close to one another, making bed-fellows of poems rarely seen...