The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke »

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.

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

Publishers Weekly

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) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.