Beauty is not for us to make

Wo ist zu diesem Innen

ein Außen?

—Rainer Maria Rilke, New Poems, II

Disturbed by what he saw, smelled, and heard from the city that was foreign to his ear and to his sensibilities, twenty-six-year-old Rainer Maria Rilke passed his nights in Paris among company well known for mixing wretchedness with exultation: Job and Baudelaire. In a letter to Lou Andreas-
Salomé, he describes the unlikely consolation the French poet provided him at the time:

How far away from me [Baudelaire] was in everything, one of the most alien to me; often I can scarcely understand him, and yet sometimes deep in the night when I said his words after him like a child, then he was the person closest to me and lived beside me and stood pale behind the thin wall and listened to my voice falling. What a...