Diaries of a Young Poet Book

These diaries are like the workshop in which Rilke crafted his artistic ethos, where his ideas of God as spiritual construct, the exegency of solitude, the interrelation of life and death, and the imagistic fashioning of the self all begin to flower and bloom.

Rilke often writes about experiences that occur in his life, and will later use these experiences, in tandem with his thoughts and ideals, to craft a poem. This work contains a number of early versions of pieces that would later appear in the Book of Images, as well as some poems not published elsewhere.

Though the young Rilke is still enamoured with ideals, much of his deep-rooted convictions are already in place here. And while it may appear at times that the idea of fashioning one's own life as a work of art is somewhat of an egoistic idea, Rilke writes how this can only be done through a sort of death, by alienating these experiences from oneself, that they become blood after having been forgotten. The thing, which seeks to speak, can aid us in this endeavour. For in allowing the thing to speak our place is subsumed, given over and passed on, and yet something that we ourselves perhaps could not say may be carried forth.

"What good will my blood be, when it ripens like wine?
It cannot scream back out of the ocean
that One who loved me most."

To love, out of oneself, unto death; such would be art.