It is true that a correspondence of this sort was not unique for Rilke. Throughout his career unknown young admirers wrote to him, hoping for advice, approval, or simply the undivided attention they had discovered in his poems. Rilke always responded kindly, and often with great generosity. But because Kappus was associated, through Professor Horaček, with the military school where Rilke had spent the most painful years of his life — a period he was later to call “one long terrifying damnation” — there must have been a special poignance for him in the young man’s confusion and request for help. And one does sometimes have the strange feeling that Rilke is writing, across time, directly to his younger self, that desperate, miserable boy. This may explain the urgency and intimacy with which the future great poet (only twenty-seven when the first letter was written) was able to address his almost anonymous correspondent, and may temper the occasional tone of exhortation or preachiness: that he felt he had to use.
Rilke’s life was studded with turning-points; but the turning-point during which these letters were written was a particularly acute one. He had already composed the first two sections of The Book of Hours and a large part of The Book of Pictures — lovely poems, many of them, yet with something too easy, too harmonious and self-indulgent, at their core. Early in 1903 “The Panther” burst into existence, and a year later the great “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.” These were poems of a different order, astonishing in their power and maturity, the first experiences of that awesome voice which can speak through Rilke as it has spoken through the greatest poets of all ages. In realizing what had happened, he must have known both intense exhilaration and the difficulty of having to begin all over again, with a sense of how little he had achieved and a vastly enlarged sense of what was possible.
