He would become one of the most important poets of the twentieth century; she a muse of Europe's fin-de-siecle thinkers and artists. In this collection of letters, a finalist for the PEN USA translation award, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salome, a writer and intellectual fourteen years his senior, pen a relationship that spans thirty years and shifting boundaries: as lovers, as mentor and protege, and as deep personal and literary allies.

One of the twentieth century's great originals, Rilke's poetry stands beside the philosophy of Nietzsche and the sculpture of Rodin. These pages clearly reflect the development of his art from the early exploration of love and death, anguish and ecstasy, to the more precise poetry of his later period, acutely aware of a sense of alienated terror. This bilingual edition contains the full text of his Duino Elegies, complete with an appendix of fragments, alongside generous selections from The Sonnets to Orpheus and the earlier volumes of poetry. 'Excellent ...it is easy to feel that if Rilke...