Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé: the correspondence Translated by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler W W Norton, 424pp, £25 ISBN 0393049760

The gifted daughter of a Russian general, Lou Andreas-Salomé met the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke in 1897. By this time she was in her mid-thirties, and an established member of the late 19th-century European intelligentsia, while Rilke was an unknown young writer. Their brief affair gradually mutated into a relationship based mainly on the exchange of letters, which lasted for more than 25 years - all of Rilke's poetic career - with unabated ardour and engagement.

This volume of their correspondence opens with a series of effusive and youthful declarations of love, but it is worth persevering through this early writing. In 1903 Rilke sent Andreas-Salomé a description of the crowds in Paris that counts as one of the great literary letters. "And what people I have encountered since then, almost daily!" he wrote. "They wore the comfortless, discoloured mimicry of cities grown too large, and they endured under the foot of each day that stepped on them, like tough beetles - endured as if there was still something to wait for, twitched like pieces of a large chopped-up fish that is already rotting but still alive."

In return for these literary fireworks, Andreas-Salomé's role was to offer the poet enthusiasm and psychological support. Rilke detailed his needs and his doubts to her, and she reassured him. Her early philosopher's training (she studied with Nietzsche) and her later delvings into Freudian psychoanalysis (she was a close friend of Freud's) provide an intellectual glitter, but it is warmth and common sense that radiate from her letters. Andreas-Salomé later admitted that his actual presence took far too great a toll on her: a long-distance approach suited her, and perhaps him, far better. In a bad moment in 1914, Rilke wrote that no one could help him, that he would cut off anyone who tried in "a realm of suffocating loveliness", and we catch a glimpse of the horrors that any day-to-day relationship with him would have brought.

Rilke's self-obsession was pathological. The letters minutely describe the psychological burden of creativity - the long periods of idleness, the torment of an infertile imagination, the solitude. His friend Rodin's mantra "Il faut travailler" became a stick he beat himself with throughout his life. Rilke constantly returned to the problems of being sensitive to such a degree that it wreaks havoc on both psyche and physique. The letters are wonders of self-analysis, and one can see why he decided not to pursue a course of psychoanalysis: nobody knew Rainer as Rainer did.

But Rilke was a great letter writer and a great stylist. His self-obsession needs to be weighed against the generosity of his letters, the capacity he had for communication and friendship. And much of what he wrote on creativity is breathlessly clear, incisive and inspiring - it is a tribute to the translators that this freshness is undiminished in the English.

This new volume offers the complete extant letters, so there is plenty of discussion about vitamin supplements, train times, vegetarian restaurants in Munich and the matters that make up the récitatif of correspondence. A Selected Letters might be more digestible, but many of the less profound passages offer a sense of the age and the ordinary concerns of the bohemian artist. In these, Rilke emerges as a very real and touching man, negotiating everyday life with a slight preciousness and immense haplessness.

Sasha Dugdale's second collection of poems, "The Estate", is published in February by Carcanet

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