Available for the first time in a single volume Ranier Maria Rilke's two most beloved
sequences of poems rendered by his most faithful translator. Rilke is unquestionably the
twentieth century's most significant and compelling poet of romantic transformation and
spiritual quest. His poems of ecstatic identification with the world exert perennial
fascination. In Stephen Mitchell's versions of Rilke's two greatest masterpieces readers will
discover an English rendering that captures the lyric intensity fluency and reach of his
poetry. Stephen Mitchell adheres impeccably to Rilke's text to his formal music and to the
complexity of his thought at the same time Mitchell's work has authority and power as poetry
in its own right.
