A nineteen-year-old military cadet sends his verses to a famous poet and receives in return not criticism but a set of instructions for living. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote these ten letters between 1903 and 1908 to Franz Xaver Kappus, and their counsel is at once simple and bottomless: go inward, be patient with all that is unresolved, love the questions themselves, let solitude do its work. Rilke writes from Paris, from Rome, from a Swedish castle, each letter deepening the same theme: that the creative life demands not talent alone but a willingness to be transformed by one's own depths. The prose is luminous and exact. These are letters that find their true recipient in every reader who opens them.