“You have to live life to the limit, not according to each day but by plumbing its depth.”

–RAINER MARIA RILKE

In this treasury of uncommon wisdom and spiritual insight, the best writings and personal philosophies of one of the twentieth century’s greatest poets, Rainer Maria Rilke, are gleaned by Ulrich Baer from thousands of pages of never-before translated correspondence.

The result is a profound vision of how the human drive to create and understand can guide us in every facet of life. Arranged by theme–from everyday existence with others to the exhilarations of love and the experience of loss, from dealing with adversity to the nature of inspiration, here are Rilke’s thoughts on how to live life in a meaningful way:

Life and Living: “How good life is. How fair, how incorruptible, how impossible to deceive: not even by strength, not even by willpower, and not even by courage. How everything remains what it is and has only this choice: to come true, or to exaggerate and push too far.”

Art: “The work of art is adjustment, balance, reassurance. It can be neither gloomy nor full of rosy hopes, for its essence consists of justice.”

Faith: “I personally feel a greater affinity to all those religions in which the middleman is less essential or almost entirely suppressed.”

Love: “To be loved means to be ablaze. To love is: to shine with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away; to love is to last.”

Intimate, stylistically masterful, brilliantly translated, and brimming with the wonder and passion of Rilke, The Poet’s Guide to Life is comparable to the best works of wisdom in all of literature and a perfect book for all occasions.

"While Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet has served as inspiration for generations of artists, it presents only his best-known letters. As Baer, acting chair of NYU's German department, asserts in his introduction, Rilke was a prolific letter writer, corresponding with hundreds of people. Baer's goal in this unsuccessful collection is to convey Rilke's wisdom on many aspects of existence. Rilke had much to say about the process of living, and Baer is right to find inspiration in his thoughts, but this volume displays too much of the editor's hand. By presenting Rilke's thoughts on subjects ranging from grief to language to love as short, aphoristic capsules (some passages are no longer than a line), Baer takes them out of the context in which they were written. Letters, even from a sage to a supplicant, are part of a dialogue. It's not just chronology that is lost here — the reader cannot trace Rilke's own developing ideas — but what seems to have been of utmost importance to the writer himself: his participation in two-way relationships. (On sale Mar. 22)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Baer (German and comparative literature, New York U.) presents translated excerpts from German poet Rilke's (1875-1926) some 7,000 letters in German and French. Among the domains they address are being with others, work, nature, solitude, illness and recovery, language, art, faith, goodness and morality, and love. The sources are identified in the end matter, to keep from interrupting the meditative flow of the wisdom. There is no index.
Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Rainer Maria Rilke undoubtedly ranks among the greatest of 20th century poets. But Rilke was also a profound thinker who, in his vast correspondence and prose writings, brilliantly illuminated the human condition. Here for the first time in English are Rilke's most trenchant and valuable observations--on love and happiness, illness and death, dreams and religion, language and art, work and ambition, childhood and old age. This book magnificently expresses the poet's conception of a meaningful life: It is a luminous and relevant guide filled with insights and reflections readers will turn to again and again. "You have to live life to the limit, not according to each day but by plumbing its depth.... In a word: one ought to turn the most extreme possibility inside oneself into the measure for one's life. For our life is vast and can accommodate as much future as we are able to carry."

RAINER MARIA RILKE (1875—1926) ranks among the great poets of world literature, and was the author of Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus.

Ulrich Baer, a scholar of modern German, French, and American poetry, is the author of Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Célan and Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma. He is the editor of 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11. Baer is associate professor of German and comparative literature at New York University and acting chair of the German department.