For Rainer Maria Rilke, letter writing was a discipline and art unto itself. Some seven thousand of his letters have survived, among them works of profound beauty and insight to rival his poems and fiction. For the first time, this volume makes available to an English-speaking audience two of the earliest collections of Rilke letters published after his death, each with a nuanced introduction and notes by Annemarie S. Kidder.

The thematic collection Letters on God contains two letters by Rilke, the first an actual letter written during World War I, in 1915 in Munich, the second a fictional one composed after the war, in 1922 at Muzot in Switzerland. In these letters, Rilke builds on the mystical view of God conceived in The Book of Hours, but he moves beyond it, demonstrating a unique vision of God and Christ, the church and religious experience, friendship and death.

Like his famous Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke’s Letters to a Young Woman presents an intimate series of letters written to a young admirer. The nine letters collected here were written to Lisa Heise over the course of five years, from 1919 to 1924. Though Rilke and Heise never met, the poet emerges in these letters as a compassionate listener and patient teacher who with levelheaded sensitivity affirms and guides the movements of another person’s soul.

RAINER MARIA RILKE (1875–1926) is considered one of the German language’s greatest twentieth-century poets. Among other works, he wrote Duino Elegies, The Sonnets to Orpheus, and the novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Bilingual editions of Rilke’s The Book of Hours: Prayers to a Lowly God, Duino Elegies, and New Poems are published by Northwestern University Press.

ANNEMARIE S. KIDDER is a professor at the Ecumenical Theological Seminary in Detroit. The author and editor of numerous books, she is also the translator of The Mystical Way in Everyday Life (2010), a collection of spiritual writings by Karl Rahner; Pictures of God (2005), an anthology of Rilke’s religious poetry; and Rilke’s The Book of Hours: Prayers to a Lowly God (Northwestern, 2002).