Sculptor Auguste Rodin once wrote that 'one has only to look at a human face to find a soul, no feature deceives; hypocrisy is as transparent as sincerity. The inclining of the brow, the least furrowing of a look may reveal the -secrets of the heart.' Rodin was fortunate to have as his -secretary Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the most sensitive poets of our time. These essays discussing Rodin's work and development as an artist are as revealing of Rilke as they are of his subject. Written in 1903 and 1907, these meditations mark the entry of the poet into the world of letters. The book sheds light on the profound psychic connection between the two great artists, both masters of giving life to the invisible within the visible, concerned with 'the unnoticed, the small, the concealed . . . with the profound and surprising unrest of living things.' Over a dozen -reproductions of Rodin's little known water-colors and drawings will accompany the essay.

Rainer Maria Rilke, born in Prague in 1875, is arguably the greatest German poet since Goethe. His major works include his Duino Elegies, The Sonnets to Orpheus, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, The Book of Hours, and Letters to a Young Poet.

Daniel Slager (Translator) is an editor at Harcourt and a contributing editor to Grand Street. His translations of texts by Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka, and Heiner Müller have been widely acclaimed, and his renderings of Durs Grünbein, Marcel Beyer, Felicitas Hoppe, and Terézia Mora have marked these authors' first publications in the U.S.

William Gass (Introduction) is the author of four novels and five books of essays. He has been the recipient of grants from the Rockefeller, Lannan, and Guggenheim foundations. He has received two National Book Critics Circle Awards for Criticism. Gass lives in St. Louis where he is the Director of the -International Writers Center.

First published under the title An Unofficial Rilke', Hamburger's translations have been critically acclaimed for their contribution towards a more complete understanding of one of the major poets of the 20th century.

While Rilke has been perhaps more widely translated into English than any other modern poet, the emphasis has always been on 'major works' - the New Poems' volumes, Duino Elegies' and Sonnets to Orpheus'. Yet Rilke produced many more poems which had little or no airing beyond the confines of his workshop. Michael Hamburger argues in his perceptive and entertaining introduction that these poems are not inferior to the poems in the collections that form the accepted corpus; rather that they merely failed to fit in with Rilke's wish to form a definitive statement.

Michael Hamburger was born in Berlin in 1924 and came to Britain in 1933. Among the many authors he has translated from are Hölderlin, Goethe, Paul Celan and Peter Huchel. He is equally acclaimed as one of Britain's leading poets of the period since World War II. Anvil publishes his Collected Poems 1941-1994' and his subsequent collections.