Unboxing Rilke’s Nachlass

Ian Ellison in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

What is it about Rainer Maria Rilke? The influence of the Bohemian Austrian poet on modern culture reads like a who’s who of the great and the good. W. H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Edith Sitwell claimed to be directly inspired by him. The first English translations of his work, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, became classics in their own right. He has been set to music (both classical and rock) and proven himself a Hollywood touchstone, most recently providing the concluding epigraph of Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit. Oprah Winfrey has quoted him on television and Lady Gaga has lines from his Letters to a Young Poet (1929) tattooed on her arm.

More here.