At the beginning of 1903, a pupil at the military academy in Wiener-Neustadt, Franz Xaver Kappus, sends a few poems to Rainer Maria Rilke, already a famous poet, and asks him to examine these texts. A few weeks later, he receives a blue-sealed envelope with a Paris postmark: this is the first of a total of ten letters in which Rilke addresses the subject of his writing, his reading, indeed his entire view of life. To this day, the ‘Letters to a young poet’ are among the best-loved of all Rilke’s works.