Rilke was 35 years younger. Rainer Maria Rilke was not yet 30 when he met Rodin in 1902. Rilke and Rodin – their friendship, their rupture, the reversal and renewal, their marriages, and then Rilke ‘no longer a sapling cowering beneath the shade of Rodin.’ World War I followed, and both left Paris, but by then Rodin’s ideas about art and creativity had already influenced Rilke’s work.

The marriage soon ended. But Rodin’s greatest gift to Rilke was the very thing that lends Letters to a Young Poet its abiding spiritual allure: the art of empathy.

The relationship between the master sculptor and the pupil poet, we learn, was both tempestuous and tranquil. Maybe Rilke loved Rodin's art better than he loved Rodin's student. Rilke's commentary on Rodin's art and reflections on the artist at work.

After the sculptor’s death, the building became Paris’s Rodin Museum. Rodin met Rilke there, spent hours catching up, buried the hatchet, and decided to move in the following month. During the early 1900s Rilke, the poet and author of the well-known "Letters to a Young Poet," lived and worked in Paris as Rodin's secretary, often inhabiting his workshops and watching some … Rilke spoke incessantly about Rodin and the monograph, a project that Becker believed was little more than thinly veiled social climbing. First, he married Rodin's student. From the outset, he devoted himself to the man who had just been proclaimed the latest master sculptor. Rilke and Rodin, it turns out, cared about each other in strange ways.

Rilke drifted into Rodin's orbit like a straw moving into a whirlpool. This fine letter from one of the greatest German poets was the starting point of Rodin’s relationship with the Hôtel Biron, which would lead to the founding of the museum, in 1916. Rodin was born in 1840.