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Rainer Maria Rilke has been called the most significant and compelling poet of spiritual experience of the 20th century. His exploration of the struggle between life and art and the supremacy of divine love over personal love has touched the hearts of men and women everywhere. The poems in this reading are from the selected poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is the finest Austrian poet of this century and one of the greatest lyrical writers in the history of Western literature. A major figure in the modernist movement, with some affinities to Yeats, Rilke had a profound influence on other 20th century poets such as Pasternak and Akhmatova. He is a master of vivid and breathtakingly original imagery in which difficult ideas are made directly apprehensible to the reader and new worlds of experience are opened up.

Do men need poems? Is the gender of brawn and ‘can-do’ really a candidate for honeyed verse? Obviously yes. Through the centuries men seem to dominate the writing of poetry. From books of epics to quatrains of love poetry it seemed to be a man’s world. His domain. A volume purely for men, to show other facets of their personalities and characters seems to be an obvious choice. One verse fits all is, in fact, far removed from the truth. Men needs words. They need support, understanding as well as goals, ambition and structure. They need purpose, desire; the need to love and be loved.