Letters to a Young Poet Book

Rilke (1875-1926) was a famous German poet, born in Prague. He traveled widely throughout Europe, married and had a daughter. A dozen years out of school, after Rilke had achieved some fame as a poet, a young man wrote to him asking for advice about life and poetry. Rilke wrote ten letters to him over five years. The young boy was romantic, frail and dreamy; a prisoner, so to speak, in a military boarding school where he was subject to strict discipline, bullying and humiliation. It was the same school that Rilke's father sent him to in preparation for a career as a military officer. And all those adjectives also applied to Rilke who had been in the identical situation. So, in a sense, Rilke poured his heart out writing to his younger self.



Some of Rilke's writings in the ten letters:

"For the creative artist there is no poverty - nothing is insignificant or unimportant."

"There is nothing that manages to influence a work of art less than critical words. They always result in more or less unfortunate misunderstandings. Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe. Most happenings are beyond expression; they exist where a word has never intruded."

Writing in 1904 Rilke was amazingly prescient about the upcoming sexual revolution:

"Perhaps the sexes are more closely related than one would think. Perhaps the great renewal of the world will consist of this, that man and woman, freed of all confused feelings and desires, shall no longer seek each other as opposites, but simply as members of a family and neighbors, and will unite as human beings, in order to simply, earnestly, patiently, and jointly bear the heavy responsibility of sexuality that has been entrusted to them….This progress shall transform the experience of love, presently full of error, opposed at first by men, who have been overtaken in their progress by women. It shall thoroughly change the love experience to the rebuilding of a relationship meant to be between two persons, no longer just between man and woman….The men, who today cannot yet feel it coming, shall be surprised and defeated by it."

"Do not allow yourself to be confused in your aloneness by the something within you that wishes to be released from it. This very wish, if you will calmly and deliberately use it as a tool, will help to expand your solitude into far distant realms."

"Everything you can think about in your childhood is good."

"Of all my books there are only a few that are indispensable to me. Two of them are constantly at my fingertips wherever I may be. They are here with me now: the Bible and the books of the great Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen." (Rilke particularly praises Jacobsen's collection of short stories, Mogens, which I have reviewed here: )

"We are unutterably alone, essentially, especially in the things most intimate and most important to us….It becomes increasingly clear that it [aloneness] is basically not something we can choose to have or not to have. We simply are alone. One can only delude one's self and act as though it were not so - that is all."

The second half of the book is a collection of some of his poems. Most are very accessible. Here are some sections of verse that I liked

From FOR A FRIEND
I have my dead, and I would let them go
and be surprised to see them all so cheerful,
so soon at home in being-dead, so right,
so unlike their repute. You, you alone,
return; brush past me, move about, persist
in knocking something that vibratingly
betrays you.

From ORPHEUS. EURYDICE. HERMES.
Wrapt in herself she wandered. And her deadness
was filling her like fullness.
Full as a fruit with sweetness and with darkness
was she with her great death, which was so new
that for the time she could take nothing in.

From THE CATHEDRAL
In those small towns you come to realize
how the cathedrals utterly outgrew
their whole environment. Their birth and rise,
as our own life's too great proximity
will mount beyond our vision and our sense
of other happenings, took precedence
of all things; as though that were history,
piled up in their immeasurable masses
in petrification safe from circumstance,

From THE DWARF'S SONG
My hands too will always be failing me.
How hopelessly stunted they are you can see:
damp, heavy, hopping constrictedly
like little toads in wet weather.
And everything else about me too
is old and worn and sad to view;
why does God delay to do
away with it altogether?

From THE ORPHAN GIRL'S SONG
I'm no one, and no one is what I shall be.
I'm still too small to exist, I agree;
but I'll always be so.
…
No one can need me: it's too soon now,
and tomorrow it's too late.

A very thought-provoking, calming read.

Portrait of Rilke by Leonid Pasternak from Wikipedia