The “young poet” of the title was also nineteen, a military student named Franz Xaver Kappus. In his introduction to the original edition, he tells how the correspondence began. He was sitting under the ancient chestnut trees in the park of the Military Academy of Wiener Neustadt one day in the autumn of 1902, reading an early collection of Rilke’s poems, when the school’s chaplain, Professor Horaček, came up to him, took the book from his hands, looked at the cover, thumbed through the pages, and finally said, “So our pupil René Rilke has become a poet.” It turned out that Horaček had been chaplain to the Lower Military School at Sankt-Pölten fifteen years before, when Rilke was a student there. And he told Kappus about the “quiet, serious, highly-endowed boy” whom he had known and had since lost track of. “After this talk,” Kappus writes, “it is easy to understand how I immediately decided to send my attempts at poetry to Rainer Maria Rilke and to ask him for his judgment. Not yet twenty years old, and just on the threshold of a profession which I felt to be entirely opposed to my inclinations, I hoped to find understanding, if in anyone, in the poet who had written Mir zur Feier [To Celebrate Myself]. And without any conscious intention on my part, a covering letter took shape, in which I unreservedly revealed myself as never before and not ever since to a second human being. Many weeks passed before an answer came. The blue-sealed letter had a postmark from Paris, was heavy in the hand, and showed on its envelope the same clear, beautiful, and confident pen-strokes that the text was set down in, from the first line to the last. With it began my regular correspondence with Rainer Maria Rilke.”
