Frank Beacham's Journal

Scottish poet Robert Burns was born on this day in 1759 — 264 years ago

Scottish poet Robert Burns was born on this day in 1759 — 264 years ago.

The day is still celebrated by Burns fans across the English-speaking world, with high-spirited "Robert Burns Night" feasts, featuring haggis and other Scottish delicacies, as well as enthusiastic drinking, toasting and speechmaking.

Burns, the son of a poor farmer, received little formal schooling but read extensively. A restless, dissatisfied spirit, he fell in love with a young woman, Jean Armour, in the mid-1780s. The pair endured a legal struggle and her parents resisted a marriage. Eventually, the couple had nine children, the last one born on the day of Burns' funeral.

Burns published his first poetry collection, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, in 1786, and he quickly became the darling of elite Edinburgh intellectuals.

Perhaps more famous for his lively lyrics in the Scottish dialect than for his longer, more literary poems, Burns is still beloved and celebrated today as the author of the New Year's anthem, "For Auld Lang Syne."

Thanks History.com

August Strindberg, Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter, was born 174 years ago today

August Strindberg, Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter, was born 174 years ago today.

A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg's career spanned four decades. During that time he wrote over 60 plays and more than 30 works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis and politics.

A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques.

From his earliest work, Strindberg developed forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition so innovative that many were to become technically possible to stage only with the advent of film. He is considered the "father" of modern Swedish literature and his, The Red Room (1879), has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel.

During the 1890s, he spent significant time abroad engaged in scientific experiments and studies of the occult. A series of psychotic attacks between 1894 to 1896 (referred to as his "Inferno crisis") led to his hospitalization and return to Sweden. Under the influence of the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, he resolved after his recovery to become “the Zola of the Occult.”

In 1898, he returned to playwriting with To Damascus, which, like The Great Highway (1909), is a dream-play of spiritual pilgrimage.

His A Dream Play (1902) — with its radical attempt to dramatize the workings of the unconscious by means of an abolition of conventional dramatic time and space and the splitting, doubling, merging and multiplication of its characters — was an important precursor to both expressionism and surrealism.

Carl Sandburg, poet and an urban folk singer, was born 145 years ago

Photo by William A. Smith

Carl Sandburg, poet and an urban folk singer, was born 145 years ago.

Sandburg won three Pulitzer Prizes, two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. H. L. Mencken called Sandburg "indubitably an American in every pulse-beat."

Born in the three-room cottage at 313 East Third Street in Galesburg, Illinois, to parents of Swedish ancestry, Sandberg left school at the age of 13 and began driving a milk wagon. From 14 until he was 18, he worked as a porter at the Union Hotel barbershop in Galesburg.

After that he was on the milk route again for eighteen months. He became a bricklayer and a farm laborer on the wheat plains of Kansas.

After an interval spent at Lombard College in Galesburg, Sandberg became a hotel servant in Denver, then a coal-heaver in Omaha. He began his writing career as a journalist for the Chicago Daily News. Later he wrote poetry, history, biographies, novels, children's literature and film reviews.

Sandburg also collected and edited books of ballads and folklore. He spent most of his life in the Midwest before moving to North Carolina.

Sandburg volunteered to go to the military and was stationed in Puerto Rico with the 6th Illinois Infantry during the Spanish–American War, disembarking at Guánica, Puerto Rico on July 25, 1898. He was never actually called to battle.

Sandburg attended West Point for just two weeks, before failing a mathematics and grammar exam. He returned to Galesburg and entered Lombard College, but left without a degree in 1903. He moved to Milwaukee and joined the Social Democratic Party, the name by which the Socialist Party of America was known in the state.

Sandburg served as a secretary to Emil Seidel, socialist mayor of Milwaukee from 1910 to 1912. He met Lilian Steichen at the Social Democratic Party office in 1907, and they married the next year. Lilian's brother was the photographer, Edward Steichen.

Sandburg with his wife, whom he called Paula, raised three daughters.

The Sandburgs moved to Harbert, Michigan and then to suburban Chicago. They lived in Evanston, Illinois, before settling at 331 S. York Street in Elmhurst, Illinois, from 1919 to 1930. He wrote three children's books in Elmhurst — Rootabaga Stories in 1922 followed by Rootabaga Pigeons (1923) and Potato Face (1930).

He also wrote Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, a two-volume biography in 1926, The American Songbag (1927) and a book of poems, Good Morning, America (1928), in Elmhurst. In 1919, Sandburg won a Pulitzer Prize "made possible by a special grant from The Poetry Society" for his collection, Corn Huskers.

He won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for History for The War Years, the second volume of his Abraham Lincoln, and a second Poetry Pulitzer in 1951 for Complete Poems.

In 1945, he moved to Connemara, a 246-acre rural estate in Flat Rock, North Carolina. Here, he produced a little over a third of his total published work, and lived with his wife, daughters and two grandchildren.

On February 12, 1959, in commemorations of the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth, Congress met in joint session to hear actor Fredric March give a dramatic reading of the Gettysburg Address, followed by an address by Sandburg. To date, Sandburg remains the only American poet ever invited to address a joint session of Congress.

Sandburg supported the civil rights movement, and was the first white man to be honored by the NAACP with their Silver Plaque Award, proclaiming him to be a "major prophet of civil rights in our time."

Sandburg died of natural causes in 1967. His ashes were interred under "Remembrance Rock," a granite boulder located behind his birth house.

Sandburg's 1927 anthology, the American Songbag, enjoyed enormous popularity, going through many editions.

Sandburg himself was perhaps the first American urban folk singer, accompanying himself on solo guitar at lectures and poetry recitals, and in recordings, long before the first or the second folk revival movements (of the 1940s and 1960s, respectively).

According to musicologist Judith Tick: As a populist poet, Sandburg bestowed a powerful dignity on what the '20s called the "American scene" in a book he called a "ragbag of stripes and streaks of color from nearly all ends of the earth ... rich with the diversity of the United States."

Reviewed widely in journals ranging from the New Masses to Modern Music, the American Songbag influenced a number of musicians. Pete Seeger, who calls it a "landmark," saw it "almost as soon as it came out." The composer Elie Siegmeister took it to Paris with him in 1927, and he and his wife, Hannah, "were always singing these songs. That was home. That was where we belonged."

Sandburg's home of 22 years in Flat Rock, Henderson County, North Carolina, is preserved by the National Park Service as the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site. Carl Sandburg College is located in Sandburg's birthplace of Galesburg, Illinois.

Here, Sandburg performs “I Ride An Old Paint”

Khalil Gibran, Lebanese-American artist, poet and writer of the New York Pen League, was born 140 years ago

Khalil Gibran, Lebanese-American artist, poet and writer of the New York Pen League, was born 140 years ago.

Born in the town of Bsharri in the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, Ottoman Empire (north of modern-day Lebanon) to Khalil Gibran and Kamila Gibran (Rahmeh), Gibran immigrated with his family as a young man to the United States, where he studied art and began his literary career, writing in both English and Arabic.

In the Arab world, Gibran is regarded as a literary and political rebel. His romantic style was at the heart of a renaissance in modern Arabic literature, especially prose poetry, breaking away from the classical school. In Lebanon, he is still celebrated as a literary hero.

He is chiefly known in the English-speaking world for his 1923 book, The Prophet, an early example of inspirational fiction including a series of philosophical essays written in poetic English prose.

The book sold well despite a cool critical reception, gaining popularity in the 1930s and again especially in the 1960s counterculture.

Gibran is the third best-selling poet of all time, behind Shakespeare and Laozi.

Max Eastman, influential radical activist, was born 140 years ago today

Max Eastman meets Charlie Chaplin in Hollywood in 1919

Both were lovers of actress Florence Deshon

Max Eastman, influential radical activist, was born 140 years ago today.

A poet, a prose writer on literature, philosophy and society and a prominent political activist, Eastman moved to New York City for graduate school. There, he became involved with liberal and radical circles in Greenwich Village.

Eastman supported socialism and became a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance, and an activist for a number of liberal and radical causes. For several years, he edited The Masses. With his sister, Crystal Eastman, in 1917, he co-founded The Liberator, a radical magazine of politics and the arts.

In later life, however, Eastman changed his views, becoming highly critical of socialism and communism after his experiences during a nearly two-year stay in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, as well as later studies.

He was influenced by the deadly rivalry between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, by which Trotsky was assassinated, as well as the wholesale abuses of the 1930s show trials under Stalin, who conducted widespread terror against his citizens, repression and purges that resulted in the imprisonment and deaths of millions of people in the Soviet Union.

Eastman became an advocate of free-market economics and anti-communism, while remaining an atheist and independent thinker. In 1955, he published Reflections on the Failure of Socialism. He published more frequently in The National Review and other conservative journals in later life, but always remained independent in his thinking.

For instance, he publicly opposed United States involvement in the Vietnam War in the 1960s, earlier than most. He also wrote two volumes of memoirs, as well as two volumes of recollections of his friendships and personal encounters with many of the leading figures of his time.

These included Pablo Casals, Charlie Chaplin, Eugene Debs, John Dewey, Isadora Duncan, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, H. L. Mencken, John Reed, Paul Robeson, Bertrand Russell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, George Santayana, E. W. Scripps, George Bernard Shaw, Carlo Tresca, Leon Trotsky, Mark Twain and H. G. Wells.

Eastman's last memoir was Love and Revolution: My Journey Through an Epic (1964). In 1969, he died at his summer home in Bridgetown, Barbados, at the age of 86.

Edward Herrmann portrayed Eastman in the film, Reds (1981), directed by and starring Warren Beatty, which was based on the life of John Reed.

Patti Smith is 76 years old today

Patti Smith and her band perform Dec. 31, 2007 at the Bowery Ballroom, New York City

Patti Smith is 76 years old today.

A singer-songwriter, poet and visual artist, Smith became a highly influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album, Horses. Known as the "Godmother of Punk,” her work is a fusion of rock and poetry.

Smith's most widely known song is "Because the Night," which was co-written with Bruce Springsteen and reached #13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1978.

In 2005, Smith was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture, and in 2007, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. On November 17, 2010, she won the National Book Award for her memoir, Just Kids, on her life with Robert Mapplethorpe. She is also a recipient of the 2011 Polar Music Prize.

Born in Chicago, Patricia Lee Smith’s mother, Beverly, was a waitress, and her father, Grant, worked at the Honeywell plant. The family had Irish heritage. She spent her early childhood in Germantown, before her family moved to Woodbury Gardens, Deptford Township, New Jersey.

Her mother was a Jehovah's Witness. Patti had a strong religious upbringing and a Bible education, but left organized religion as a teenager because she felt it was too confining. Much later, she wrote the line, "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine," in her cover version of Them's "Gloria" in response to this experience.

Smith had an avid interest in Tibetan Buddhism beginning at about age eleven, saying "I fell in love with Tibet because their essential mission was to keep a continual stream of prayer," but that as an adult she sees clear parallels between different forms of religion, and has come to the conclusion that religious dogmas are "...man-made laws that you can either decide to abide by or not."

In 1967, she left Glassboro State College (now Rowan University) and moved to New York City. She met photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe, while working at a book store with a friend, poet Janet Hamill.

Smith and Mapplethorpe had an intense romantic relationship, which was tumultuous as the pair struggled with times of poverty, and Mapplethorpe with his own sexuality. Smith considers Mapplethorpe to be one of the most important people in her life, and in her book, Just Kids, refers to him as "the artist of my life."

Mapplethorpe's photographs of her became the covers for the Patti Smith Group LPs, and they remained friends until Mapplethorpe's death in 1989. She lived in the Hotel Chelsea with Mapplethorpe. They frequented Max's Kansas City and CBGB. Smith provided the spoken word soundtrack for Sandy Daley's art film, Robert Having His Nipple Pierced, starring Mapplethorpe.

As a member of the St. Mark's Poetry Project, she spent the early 70's painting, writing and performing. In 1971, she performed — for one night only — in Cowboy Mouth, a play that she co-wrote with Sam Shepard. (The published play's notes call for "a man who looks like a coyote and a woman who looks like a crow."

She wrote several poems, "for sam shepard" and "Sam Shepard: 9 Random Years (7 + 2)" about her relationship with Shepard.

By 1974, Patti Smith was performing rock music, initially with guitarist, bassist and rock archivist Lenny Kaye, and later with a full band comprising Kaye, Ivan Kral on guitar and bass, Jay Dee Daugherty on drums and Richard Sohl on piano. Financed by Sam Wagstaff, the band recorded a first single, "Hey Joe/Piss Factory," in 1974.

The A-side was a version of the rock standard with the addition of a spoken word piece about fugitive heiress, Patty Hearst ("Patty Hearst, you're standing there in front of the Symbionese Liberation Army flag with your legs spread, I was wondering were you gettin' it every night from a black revolutionary man and his women...").

The B-side describes the helpless anger Smith had felt while working on a factory assembly line and the salvation she discovered in the form of a shoplifted book, the 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations.

The Patti Smith Group was signed by Clive Davis of Arista Records, and in 1975 recorded their first album, Horses, produced by John Cale amid some tension. The album fused punk rock and spoken poetry and begins with a cover of Van Morrison's "Gloria,” and Smith's opening words: "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine" (an excerpt from "Oath," one of her early poems).

The austere cover photograph by Mapplethorpe has become one of rock's classic images. As the popularity of punk rock grew, the Patti Smith Group toured the United States and Europe. The rawer sound of the group's second album, Radio Ethiopia, reflected this.

Considerably less accessible than Horses, Radio Ethiopia initially received poor reviews. However, several of its songs have stood the test of time, and Smith still performs them regularly in concert.

Smith then met Fred "Sonic" Smith, former guitar player for Detroit rock band MC5 and his own Sonic's Rendezvous Band, who adored poetry as much as she did. The running joke at the time was that she married Fred only because she would not have to change her name.

They had a son, Jackson (b. 1982) who would go on to marry The White Stripes drummer, Meg White in 2009; and a daughter, Jesse (b. 1987). Through most of the 1980s, Patti Smith was in semi-retirement from music, living with her family north of Detroit in St. Clair Shores, Michigan.

In June, 1988, she released the album, Dream of Life, which included the song, "People Have the Power."

Fred Smith died on November 4, 1994 of a heart attack. Shortly afterward, Patti faced the unexpected death of her brother, Todd, and original keyboard player, Richard Sohl. When her son, Jackson, turned 14, Smith decided to move back to New York.

After the impact of these deaths, her friends — Michael Stipe of R.E.M., and Allen Ginsberg (whom she had known since her early years in New York) — urged her to go back out on the road. She toured briefly with Bob Dylan in December, 1995.

Here, Smith performs “Horses” and “Hey Joe” in 1976

Patti Smith with her children, Jackson and Jesse, in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, 1996

Photo by Annie Leibovitz

Kenneth Rexroth, San Francisco poet, was born 117 years ago today

Kenneth Rexroth, San Francisco poet, was born 117 years ago today.

A poet, translator and critical essayist, Rexroth was a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance. He paved the groundwork for the Beat movement.

Although he did not consider himself to be a Beat poet, and disliked the association, he was one of the major influences on the Beat generation, and was dubbed "Father of the Beats" by Time.

He was among the first poets in the United States to explore traditional Japanese poetic forms such as haiku.

With Rexroth acting as master of ceremonies, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen read at the famous poetry-reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on October 7, 1955.

Rexroth later served as a defense witness at Ginsberg's obscenity trial concerning the event.

Rexroth had previously sent Ginsberg (new in the Bay Area) to meet Snyder, and was thus responsible for their friendship. Lawrence Ferlinghetti named Rexroth as one of his own mentors.

Rexroth appears in Jack Kerouac's novel, The Dharma Bums, as the character Reinhold Cacoethes.

Rexroth died in Santa Barbara in 1982. He was 77.

Ossie Davis was born 105 years ago today

Ossie Davis was born 105 years ago today.

A film, television and Broadway actor, director, poet, playwright, author and social activist, Davis was married to actress/activist Ruby Dee. Guy Davis, the blues singer, is their son.

Born as Raiford Chatman Davis in Cogdell, Clinch County, Georgia, Davis is a son of Kince Charles Davis, a railway construction engineer, and his wife, Laura. The name Ossie came from a county clerk who misheard his mother's pronunciation of his initials "R.C." when he was born.

So he inadvertently became "Ossie" when his mother told the courthouse clerk in Clinch County, Ga., who was filing his birth certificate that his name was R.C. Davis.

The young Davis experienced racism from an early age when the KKK threatened to shoot his father, whose job they felt was too advanced for a black man to have.

Following the wishes of his parents, he attended Howard University but dropped out in 1939 to fulfill his acting career in New York. He later attended Columbia University School of General Studies. His acting career, which spanned eight decades, began in 1939 with the Rose McClendon Players in Harlem.

During World War II, Davis served in the United States Army in the Medical Corps. He made his film debut in 1950 in the Sidney Poitier film, No Way Out. He voiced Anansi the spider on the PBS children's television series, Sesame Street, in its animation segments.

When Davis wanted to pursue a career in acting, he ran into the usual roadblocks that blacks suffered at that time as they generally could only portray stereotypical characters such as Stepin Fetchit. Instead, he tried to follow the example of Sidney Poitier and play more distinguished characters.

When he found it necessary to play a Pullman porter or a butler, he tried to portray the character seriously and not in a stereotypical manner.

In addition to acting, Davis, along with Melvin Van Peebles and Gordon Parks, was one of the notable African-American directors of his generation. He directed movies like Gordon's War, Black Girl and the action film, Cotton Comes to Harlem.

Along with Bill Cosby and Poitier, Davis was one of a handful of African American actors able to find commercial success while avoiding stereotypical roles prior to 1970. He had a significant role in the 1965 movie, The Hill, alongside Sean Connery plus roles in The Cardinal and The Scalphunters.

However, Davis never had the tremendous commercial or critical success that Cosby and Poitier enjoyed. As a playwright, Davis wrote Paul Robeson: All-American, which is frequently performed in theatre programs for young audiences.

Davis found recognition late in his life by working in several of director Spike Lee's films, including Do The Right Thing, Jungle Fever, She Hate Me and Get on the Bus. He also found work as a commercial voice-over artist and served as the narrator of the early-1990s CBS sitcom, Evening Shade, starring Burt Reynolds. He also played one of the residents of a small southern town.

In 1999, he appeared as a theater caretaker in the Trans-Siberian Orchestra film, The Ghosts of Christmas Eve, which was released on DVD two years later.

For many years, he hosted the annual National Memorial Day Concert from Washington, DC. His distinguished bearing made him a perfect choice for the concert.

Davis's last role was a several episode guest role on the Showtime drama series, The L Word, as a father struggling with the acceptance of his daughter Bette (Jennifer Beals) parenting a child with her lesbian partner.

In his final episodes, his character was taken ill and died. His wife, Ruby Dee, was present during the filming of his own death scene. That episode, which aired shortly after Davis's own death, aired with a dedication to the actor.

In 1989, Ossie Davis and his wife, actress/activist Ruby Dee, were named to the NAACP Image Awards Hall of Fame.

In 1995, they were awarded the National Medal of Arts, the nation's highest honor conferred to an individual artist on behalf of the country and presented in a White House ceremony by the President of the United States. And in 2004, they were recipients of the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors.

In 1948, Davis married Dee. In their joint autobiography — With Ossie and Ruby — they described their decision to have an open marriage (later changing their minds).

In the mid 1960s, they moved to the New York suburb of New Rochelle where they remained ever after. Their son, Guy Davis, the blues musician, is a former actor. He appeared in the film, Beat Street, and the daytime soap opera, One Life to Live. Their daughters are Nora Davis Day and Hasna Muhammad.

David and Dee were well known civil rights activists, and were close friends of Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther King, Jr. and other icons of the era. Their deep involvement in the movement is characterized by how instrumental they were in organizing the 1963 civil rights March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, even to the point of serving as emcee.

Davis, alongside Ahmed Osman, delivered the eulogy at the funeral of Malcolm X. He re-read part of this eulogy at the end of Spike Lee's film, Malcolm X. He also delivered a stirring tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, at a memorial in New York's Central Park the day after King was assassinated in Memphis.

Davis was found dead in a Miami hotel room on February 9, 2005. He was 87.

An official cause of death was not released, but he had heart problems. He died a year after his mother, who died a month before her 106th birthday.

Kenneth Patchen, poet and novelist, was born 111 years ago today

Kenneth Patchen, poet and novelist, was born 111 years ago today.

Patchen experimented with different forms of writing and incorporated painting, drawing and jazz into his works, which were often compared with those of William Blake and Walt Whitman.

Patchen's biographer wrote that he "developed in his fabulous fables, love poems and picture poems a deep yet modern mythology that conveys a sense of compassionate wonder amidst the world's violence."

Along with his friend and peer, Kenneth Rexroth, he was a central influence over the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat Generation.

He died in January, 1972 at age 60.

Rainer Maria Rilke, poet, was born 147 years ago today

Rainer Maria Rilke, poet, was born 147 years ago today.

A Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, Rilke is one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets, writing in both verse and highly lyrical prose. Several critics have described his work as inherently "mystical."

Rilke’s writings include one novel, several collections of poetry and several volumes of correspondence in which he invokes haunting images that focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude and profound anxiety. These deeply existential themes tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist writers.

Rilke was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, travelled extensively throughout Europe, including Russia, Spain, Germany, France and Italy. In his later years, settled in Switzerland. These settings were key to the genesis and inspiration for many of his poems.

While Rilke is most known for his contributions to German literature, over 400 poems were originally written in French and dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland.

In the later 20th century, his work has found new audiences through its use by New Age theologians and self-help authors, and through frequent quoting in television programs, books and motion pictures. In the United States, Rilke remains among the more popular, best-selling poets.

In the summer of 1902, Rilke left home and travelled to Paris to write a monograph on the sculptor, Auguste Rodin. Before long his wife left their daughter with her parents and joined Rilke there. The relationship between Rilke and Clara Westhoff continued for the rest of his life.

A mutually agreed-upon effort at divorce was bureaucratically hindered by Rilke's "official" status as a Catholic, though a non-practicing one.

Rilke became deeply involved in the sculpture of Rodin, and then with the work of Paul Cézanne. For a time, he acted as Rodin's secretary, also lecturing and writing a long essay on Rodin and his work.

Rodin taught him the value of objective observation, and under this influence, Rilke dramatically transformed his poetic style from the subjective and sometimes incantatory language of his earlier work into something quite new in European literature.

In the United States, Rilke is one of the more popular, best-selling poets — along with 13th-century Sufi mystic, Rumi (1207–1273), and 20th-century Lebanese-American poet, Khalil Gibran (1883–1931).

In 1929, a minor writer, Franz Xaver Kappus (1883–1966), published a collection of ten letters that Rilke had written to him when he was a 19-year-old officer cadet studying at the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt.

The young Kappus wrote to Rilke, who had also attended the academy, between 1902 and 1908 when he was uncertain about his future career as a military officer or as a poet. Initially, he sought Rilke's advice as to the quality of his poetry, and whether he ought to pursue writing as a career.

While he declined to comment on Kappus's writings, Rilke advised Kappus on how a poet should feel, love and seek truth in trying to understand and experience the world around him and engage the world of art.

These letters offer insight into the ideas and themes that appear in Rilke's poetry and his working process. Further, these letters were written during a key period of Rilke's early artistic development after his reputation as a poet began to be established with the publication of parts of Das Stunden-Buch (The Book of Hours) and Das Buch der Bilder (The Book of Images).

In 1926, Rilke was diagnosed as having leukemia. He died at the age of 51 in the arms of his doctor on December 29, 1926 in the Valmont Sanatorium in Switzerland.