---
title: A Century After Rilke's Death, Letters to a Young Poet Is Still the Book Writers Pass to Each Other
description: Rainer Maria Rilke died on 29th December 1926. Why Letters to a Young Poet still speaks to writers, and where to mark the centenary in Madrid and Raron.
author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-11-07T20:05:12.705Z
updated: 2026-11-07T20:05:12.723Z
canonical: https://thequantumoflight.com/article/a-century-after-rilke-s-death-letters-to-a-young-poet-is-still-the-book-writers-pass-to-each-other
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/pexels-51343.webp
categories: Poets & Poetry, Writing Craft
content_type: Feature
region: Switzerland, Spain, Austria
publication: The Quantum of Light
schema_type: Article
about:
  - type: Person
    name: Rainer Maria Rilke
    description: Austrian poet (1875 to 1926), author of Letters to a Young Poet, the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus.
    jobTitle: Poet
    sameAs:
      - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_Maria_Rilke
---

In 1902 a 19-year-old officer cadet at the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt sent some of his poems to a poet he had never met. Franz Xaver Kappus wanted to know whether they were any good. Rainer Maria Rilke, then 27 and living in Paris, answered in February 1903, and over the next five years he wrote Kappus ten letters.

Rilke died on 29th December 1926, at the Valmont sanatorium near Montreux, of leukaemia diagnosed shortly before. He was 51. Three years later Kappus published the letters with Insel Verlag in Leipzig. The book that made Rilke a companion to writers everywhere appeared after he had gone, and a century on it is still the way most readers come to him.

## Franz Xaver Kappus and the Military Academy

Rilke knew the life Kappus was living. His parents had sent him to the military academy's lower school at Sankt Pölten when he was ten, and he stayed from 1886 to 1891, unhappy for most of it, until illness took him out. When a cadet from the same system wrote to him about poetry, Rilke was answering a younger version of himself.

He was not writing as a settled master either. Rilke moved constantly in those years, and the letters came from Paris, Viareggio, Worpswede, Rome and two addresses in Sweden. Between 1905 and 1906 he worked as secretary to the sculptor Auguste Rodin, who taught him to look at a thing until he saw it plainly. That lesson runs through the advice he gave Kappus.

## Letters to a Young Poet: Must You Write?

Rilke opened by refusing to judge the poems. He told Kappus to stop sending them to magazines and editors and to stop asking anyone else whether they were good. 'Go into yourself,' he wrote. He asked Kappus to search, in the stillest hour of the night, for the reason he wrote, and to find out whether he would die if he were forbidden to write. If the answer was yes, he should build his whole life around that need.

If you write, you have probably asked yourself some version of that question at three in the morning. Rilke offers no easy answer. He leaves the question with you.

## Rilke's Letters on Solitude, Love and Patience

The later letters move beyond poetry. Rilke tells Kappus to welcome solitude rather than fear it, and to treat it as the condition in which real work begins. He writes about love as hard, slow work for which two young people are rarely ready. Most famously, he urges Kappus to be patient with everything unresolved in his heart, to love the questions themselves and to live them now, so that one day he might live his way into the answers.

These passages are the reason the book is still pressed into the hands of young writers, and older ones. You can read all ten letters in a single evening, and you will probably find one you return to for years.

## Kappus's Own Letters, Found in the Rilke Archive

For almost ninety years readers had only Rilke's side. Kappus's own letters were found in the Rilke family archive in 2017, published in German in 2019 and translated into English in 2020. Kappus himself went on to serve fifteen years as an army officer, then worked as an editor, journalist and novelist. He died in 1966, and today he is remembered almost entirely as the young man Rilke wrote to.

## The Duino Elegies and Rilke's Last Years at Muzot

Rilke began the *Duino Elegies* in 1912 at Duino Castle on the Adriatic, then could not finish them for ten years through depression and war. In February 1922, at the Château de Muzot in the Swiss canton of Valais, they came in a single burst, and in the same weeks he wrote the fifty-five *Sonnets to Orpheus*.

A popular story says he died after pricking his hand on a rose thorn while picking flowers for a visitor. It is a legend. The rose belongs in his story for another reason: he chose a poem about it for his own grave. He was buried at Raron, in the Valais, on 2nd January 1927, under these lines:

> Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch, Lust, Niemandes Schlaf zu sein unter soviel Lidern.

In English, the rose is a pure contradiction, with the joy of being no one's sleep beneath so many lids.

## Rilke and Spanish Art at the Prado

Raron, where he is buried, has marked the centenary with a year of readings and events. In Madrid, the Museo del Prado opens *Rilke and Spanish Art* on 17th November in Room C of the Jerónimos Building, running until 7th March 2027. It follows his journey through Spain between November 1912 and February 1913, from Toledo, where he went to see El Greco, to Ronda and Madrid, and traces what he took from El Greco, Goya and Velázquez. Some scholars believe El Greco's angels shaped the angels of the *Duino Elegies*.

If you love Rilke's poems, read our guide to [poetry by season](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/poetry-by-season) and our piece on [the healing power of poetry](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/the-healing-power-of-poetry-a-medicine-as-old-as-writing-itself).

### Rilke's Books in This Story

- [Letters to a Young Poet](https://shop.penguin.co.uk/products/letters-to-a-young-poet-by-rainer-maria-rilke) by Rainer Maria Rilke
- Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke
- Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke

## Rainer Maria Rilke: Your Questions

**Q: Who was Letters to a Young Poet written to?**
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote Letters to a Young Poet to Franz Xaver Kappus (1883 to 1966), a 19-year-old officer cadet at the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt who had sent Rilke his poems. Rilke wrote him ten letters between 1903 and 1908. Kappus published them in 1929, three years after Rilke's death.

**Q: What did Rilke mean by living the questions?**
In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke advises a young writer to be patient with everything unresolved in his heart and to love the questions themselves instead of chasing answers he is not yet ready to understand. Living the questions means accepting uncertainty as part of growing, in the trust that the answers arrive gradually through experience.

**Q: What are Rainer Maria Rilke's most famous books?**
Rainer Maria Rilke's best known works are Letters to a Young Poet, the Duino Elegies, the Sonnets to Orpheus, The Book of Hours, New Poems and his only novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910). His most searched-for single poems are The Panther and Archaic Torso of Apollo.