By interlocking the everyday and the transcendent, Rilke suggests in his poetry, and minutely explains in his letters, that the key to the secrets of our existence might be found right in front of our eyes. This suggestion is not solely the province of Rilke’s poetry, which amounts to eleven collections published before his death in 1926 and a large number of posthumously published poems. He was a prodigious letter writer, and in his astoundingly vast correspondence Rilke let go of the constraints of German verse to produce powerful and accessible reflections on a vast range of topics.

Treat this book like a user’s manual for life: open it anywhere, if what you need right now is the grounding for your experience that seems lacking during especially trying or exhilarating periods of our lives. Or use The Poet’s Guide to Life as an adaptable resource for the moments in life when something meaningful deserves to be said. For good reason, the relatively scant number of Rilke’s words so far available in English have already become perennial favorites at weddings and graduation ceremonies, and they are placed on the walls of hospitals and nursery schools. Rilke possessed the uncanny ability to phrase the most profound experiences and emotions with great precision and without detaching them from the lived reality in which they arise or to which they respond. This book contains these words, which Rilke intended to be used in and for life. He did not want his writing to be put under glass like orchids made of silk but instead hoped it would be read irreverently, spoken not only by professional custodians of high culture, but breathed deeply into the messiness of life that no one can avoid.

Rilke points out that we can be shaken by losses and by gains, that we may be unsettled as much by negative encounters, adversity, difficulty, illness, loss, and death as by the peculiar intensification of our being in the experience of joy, friendship, creation, and, especially, love. He also stresses that during those experiences, even when they bring us closer to others, we are fundamentally alone. During such moments, when our life is suddenly open to questioning, we are cast back on ourselves without support from any outside agency. Every rite of passage—birth, adolescence, love, commitment, illness, loss, death—marks such an experience where we are faced with our solitude. But this is not a melancholic thought for Rilke. He revalorizes solitude as the occasion to reconsider our decisions and experiences, and to understand ourselves more accurately—and his words can serve as uncannily apt guides for such reflection.

If you are looking for specific guidance when your life confronts or rewards you with a particular challenge or opportunity, then go to a specific section. This book is organized in sections that match the overarching themes I found in the roughly seven thousand letters by Rilke I have read. The sequence of chapters and the excerpts within each chapter is not chronological but based on my experience of reading Rilke’s work. It maps life on a trajectory that leads from a consideration of being with others, work, adversity, education, nature, and solitude through illness, loss, and death to the emergence of ourselves into language, art, creation, and, finally, the culmination of ourselves in the experience of love. Oh, yes, Rilke is the great poet of love. He was not born that way, but his own experiences left him with no choice but to believe without surrender in that great, excessive possibility of loving another human being, which might befall any one of us at any moment. But, no, he is not sentimental. Love is placed at the end of this book because for Rilke love is work and, ultimately, a difficult achievement of the soul. In our age that is so hungry for spiritual sustenance and so easily seduced by the promise of salvation, Rilke proves relevant by defining love as modern man’s equivalent of the prayer to our vanished gods. It is the great gift that the otherwise radically indifferent if not inhospitable world can bestow on us— in the form of the encounter with another person. This is not an easy thing to phrase correctly. And there are countless other instances of small or vast internal shifts, which sometimes, but not always, coincide with socially marked and widely celebrated life events, that can benefit from the lucidity of Rilke’s prose. The Poet’s Guide to Life is meant to offer words that can capture the significance, the depth, the import of such occasions.

Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (a series of ten letters written between 1903 and 1908 and first published in 1929) have initiated scores of readers into a serious engagement with Rilke, while the famous opening of the Duino Elegies—“Who, if I cried out, would hear me scream among the angels’ orders?”—undoubtedly ranks among the most poignant expressions of man’s thirst for meaning in an age bereft of transcendental assurances. To the same degree that Rilke has compelled readers outside of the academy, literary critics produce lengthy analyses of Rilke’s promise of redemption suspended over the abyss of nothingness which haunts all of modern literature. This promise of existential salvation in Rilke’s work is considered the extreme possibility of modern, that is, secular, literature.

And yet, while there has been remarkably sustained interest in and productive critical engagement with his work, the Rilke of everyday life is waiting to be discovered. The famous Letters to a Young Poet constitutes nothing but a small fragment of Rilke’s true output as a letter writer. That slim book was written during a period when Rilke was still searching for his way as a poet and had barely begun to live the life that would lend his correspondence its poignancy, intensity, and weight. In those ten early letters, Rilke elaborately advises a younger poet to wait patiently for his proper calling but does not offer a nuanced view of what such a life would actually feel like, nor how we may deal with those parts of life that call us away from our desks and studies and stubbornly, gloriously, painfully distract us from this somewhat idealized, monkish devotion to our task.

This other Rilke, presented here for the first time in English, is an accessible, insightful, and, above all, surprisingly aware man who maintained an enormous, indeed staggering, correspondence with a vast array of people including aristocrats and cleaning ladies, shop owners and politicians, his wife, various patrons, editors, friends, lovers, fellow poets and artists, and unknown admirers.