Rilke's Venice

Rainer Maria Rilke criss-crossed Europe; he visited Russia and sailed on the Nile. Yet over and over again, he went to St. Mark’s Square and the Lido, the Doge’s Palace and the Grand Canal. Travel for Rilke was a passion, a way of life, and it served a single to seek impulses, stimuli, and ideas for writing. Venice, above all others, enthralled and provoked him. Using his poems and extensive letters, Birgit Haustedt shows Rilke’s intimate relationship with the city he loved the most. As Rilke himself wrote, "Poems are not, as people think, feelings . . . they are practical experiences."