And because many of them have become public only very recently and long after their recipients’ deaths, they reach us by and large as their actual, first readers.

Rilke often felt that he was held back, like a failing student, in the “pain-classes of life.” Although he had dropped out of military academy, Rilke remained a disciplined student even in life, and when threatened with flunking its “pain-classes” he set upon deciphering and studying for the hard lessons again. For this purpose, he wrote out each “assignment” dealt to him by life in order not to miss anything the next time around—hence some of Rilke’s notoriously self-pitying complaints, but hence also his tireless energy in returning to particular questions of our existence to find with each new sentence a more precise way of addressing what remains unanswered. Much of Rilke’s strength as a letter writer rests with his particular way of fusing metaphysical thoughts with utterly immediate images. It is true that a good number of these startling contractions of the earthly and the transcendental into a single striking image are the result of sudden inspiration. Many of Rilke’s greatest poems were conceived on walks and jotted down outside; the eighth and ninth of the Duino Elegies, Rilke wrote to a friend, were completed on the way back from the post office where he had just mailed the “victory” telegram announcing completion of the circle’s first seven poems. But the moving images that captured his imagination so suddenly had often germinated as a phrase or image in a letter. Through this unending process of rendering intelligible to himself this life with its afflictions and advantages, with selfish decisions and moments of boundless generosity, Rilke begins to explain life to us.

Rilke diligently rewrote whole pages of his letters while at his custom-built high desk if there was so much as a spelling error or a tiny ink spot on a page, and he began anew whenever his train of thought had been interrupted and he was dissatisfied with the result. But this epistolary perfectionism does not get in the way of accessibility or mitigate each letter’s apparently effortless beauty. Even when he wrote dozens of letters in a single day, no two descriptions of the same event are quite the same; for each correspondent, Rilke varied his diction to come closer to the honesty, the precision, and the emotional accuracy he valued above all else in his work. A little over a year before his death in a Swiss sanatorium, Rilke stipulated in October 1925 that his letters could be published “because for several years now I have made it my habit to channel occasionally part of the productivity of my nature into letters.” In the letters excerpted here, Rilke hones his power of expression and gradually achieves the acuity and economy that characterizes his poetry. Carrying on his startlingly vast correspondence constituted for Rilke “the ascent into a state of conscious reflection” and a “coming to his senses” as a poet. The letters are Rilke’s workshop, laboratory, and rehearsal space where he develops his particular gift of using German to express matters of tremendous gravity—the suffering and the joy promised by life—without turning abstract, turgid, or academic.

In many letters, Rilke creates phrases, thoughts, and descriptions that later enter into a poem. The experience of hearing a birdcall with such immediacy that it seemed to resonate inside of him one winter night in Capri finds expression in several letters before it enters two later poems and a prose piece in 1913 (and is quoted by Robert Downey Jr. and Marisa Tomei, to good effect, in the romantic film comedy Only You). In another letter written on December 15, 1906, Rilke states his ambition to be able to describe a rose and then gently unfurls a yellow rose for two pages, petal by petal, word by word, lid by lid: a prose rendition of Rilke’s favorite flower that doubtlessly prepared the soil for several series of poems on roses written between 1915 and 1921 and, finally, for the haunting epitaph written in 1925 for his own gravestone (the last line plays on the German word Lied, which can sound like both song and lid; the word for “pure” [reiner] in the first line is a homonym of his name): “Rose, oh pure [reiner] contradiction / joy to be nobody’s sleep / beneath so many lids [Liedern].”

Frequently, however, as if these descriptions had served only to jolt Rilke’s imagination, he does not forsake the letter for a poem but advances to the kind of coherent paragraph where a thought attains relevance for readers beyond the letter’s addressee. But because these paragraphs originate in Rilke’s epistolary dialogues where he talks about his experiences, they remain grounded in everyday life, and Rilke’s awareness of the addressee keeps the prose from becoming abstract or overly general, either of which would make it lose its personal urgency. As if unconsciously signaling the greater relevance of such sections, Rilke rarely uses “I” and almost never addresses his recipient directly when he embarks on a more sweeping reflection or seeks to phrase advice more carefully; the tone detaches from the intimacy of a private letter but involves the other in a dialogue that is neither self-consciously artful nor aloof.

In his letters, Rilke achieves what his aesthetic principles also mandate for true art: all things and experiences are allowed to speak to him from their proper place in the world, and not only as they are framed there and made sense of by him. Just as he invests his poetry with the power to intertwine everyday affairs and transcendent ideas, Rilke writes in a letter that the essence of true help, for instance, might consist in a modest piece of string offered at the right moment, when it’s truly needed. This little piece of string could be “no less helpful in saving our strength” than the most elaborate, long-term assistance. For Rilke, both his artistic credo and his most fundamental insight into how to live one’s life call for a wholly inclusive view of the world.

There courses through Rilke’s work the steady commitment to celebrate life in all of its manifestations. This desire is announced already in the title of one of his first books of poetry, To Celebrate Myself (1899). It differs fundamentally from the willingness to get to the bottom of life by any means that characterized poets such as Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud against whom the young Rilke defined himself. The point became not to observe and comment on life, describing it as if from the outside, or to wrestle it to the ground and overwhelm it with the aid of intoxicants and provocation. Rilke considered the writer’s task to consist of joining his voice to the sounds of agony, suffering, ecstasy, and exhilaration and also to the everyday exchanges between individuals, and the interior monologues of all of us.

Rilke’s descriptions of sites, people, and objects achieve a simplicity and analytic precision that Rilke found nowhere in the learned European cultures of which he was a part. By honing his receptivity, attentiveness, and mindfulness, he eschews the short-cuts of received opinion. Instead of tethering himself to a rigid work ethic, however, Rilke sought to bring all of his experiences, including unproductive periods of “infertility” and “idleness,” into one uninterrupted state of mind. Like all major writers, he creates from an inchoate awareness of the inadequacy of all available explanations of the world but does not allow this frustration to become the focus of his inquiry and thus drown out the world a second time. Nothing that Rilke read made sufficient sense of his life for him. As a consequence, he wrote a guide to life himself.

So much has been written (both well and poorly) about things that the things themselves no longer hold an opinion but appear only to mark the imaginary point of intersection for certain clever theories. Whoever wants to say anything about them speaks in reality only about the views of his predecessors and lapses into a semipolemical spirit that stands in exact opposition to the naïve productive spirit with which each object wants to be grasped and understood.

In addition to serving as the workshop for his poetry, then, Rilke’s letters claim a perspective on the world that breaks with traditions of knowledge handed down to him.