The Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was an avid letter writer, and more than 7.000 of his letters have survived. One of his best known collection is Rilke’s Letter to a young woman, published in 1930. This collection gathers several letters that Rilke wrote to Lisa Heise between 1919 and 1924. Rilke was in his 40s at the time of the first letter; Heise was 26 . Her husband of three years had left her and her 2-year-old son. Though Rilke and Heise never met, Rilke emerges in these letters as the compassionate listener and patient teacher. In his final letter to Heise, her situation much improved, Rilke writes: "And what does living mean but this courage to fully grow into a cast, which one day will be broken off from our new shoulders." The result, he says, will be a joyful freedom. The poet would die two years later. Letters to a young woman integrates the collection “Classics of World Literature”, developed by Atlântico Press, a publisher company present in the global editorial market, since 1992.
Author
A mystic lyricism and precise imagery often marked verse of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose collections profoundly influenced 20th-century German literature and include The Book of Hours (1905) and The Duino Elegies (1923). People consider him of the greatest 20th century users of the language. His haunting images tend to focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety—themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets. His two most famous sequences include the Sonnets to Orpheus , and his most famous prose works include the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge . He also wrote more than four hundred poems in French, dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland, his homeland of choice.
