Judith Ryan traces Rilke's development from aestheticism to modernism, paying special attention to the way his work engages with other poetry and the visual arts. Taking a skeptical view of Rilke's own myth of himself as a solitary genius, Ryan shows how deeply his writing is embedded in the culture of its day. Rilke is now the most widely-read and influential German-language poet, and this study is full of surprising discoveries about his innovative and often profoundly moving poems.