One of the twentieth century's great originals, Rilke's poetry stands beside the philosophy of Nietzsche and the sculpture of Rodin. These pages clearly reflect the development of his art from the early exploration of love and death, anguish and ecstasy, to the more precise poetry of his later period, acutely aware of a sense of alienated terror. This bilingual edition contains the full text of his Duino Elegies, complete with an appendix of fragments, alongside generous selections from The Sonnets to Orpheus and the earlier volumes of poetry. 'Excellent . . . it is easy to feel that if Rilke had written in English, he would have written in this English' New York Times Book Review