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Can Rilke Change Your Life? | The New Yorker

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“Letters to a Young Poet” has spoken to artists for almost a century. The other half of the famous correspondence reveals the treacherous work of becoming who you want to be.

Save this story Save this story In February, 1903, a nineteen-year-old Austrian military cadet named Franz Xaver Kappus received a letter whose contents, he hoped, would teach him how to live. “The envelope,” he later wrote, “bore a blue seal and a Paris postmark, weighed heavy in my hand, and presented the same clear, beautiful, confident handwriting on the envelope as the letter itself had from first line to last.” The confidence that Kappus saw in the hand of his correspondent offered an inverse image of the self-doubt that had led him, months earlier, to write to that man—the poet Rainer M

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