Reviews for Letters to a Young Poet

The average rating for Letters to a Young Poet based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-08-25 00:00:00 Brady Willcox 'Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.' Rainer Maria Rilke puts forth the question 'must I write?' in these letters from the great poet to the unknown Mr. Kappus. 'Dig into yourself for a deep answer,' he tells the young poet, 'and if this answer rights out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must", then build your life in accordance with this necessity.' Letters To A Young Poet, written between 1903-08, contains some of the most passionately moving words of encouragement and examination into the life of an artist. Rilke advises that 'a work of art is good if it has risen out of necessity', that they must feel they 'would have to die if you were forbidden to write.' From there, he instructs towards the soul-searching life of solitude which best cultivates the artists gift. With powerful prose that often reaches the same sublime peaks found in his poetry, these magnanimous, heart-felt letters are some the most empowering words of wisdom into undertaking of the arts as well as an impressive portrait of Rilke himself. It is difficult to accurately explain the powers of transcendence contained in these letters. What is especially difficult is to do so in the realm of reviewing, a sort of critique that bastardizes the original message by having it be received tainted from my amateur perspective as it passes through me¹, as Rilke himself cautions against reading any sort of literary criticism, positive or negative in his very first letter.'Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experience is unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life. While, as Rilke point out, the ethereal joys brought about in me while reading this are ineffable, I would still like to take a few moments of your time to discuss how beautiful these letters are. It is a sort of minor-key beauty, spending much time navigating through the implications of solitude and painful soul-searching, yet it elevates the heart to such high levels and is sure to make anyone reach for a pen in order to try their own hand at poetry. 'We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us,' Rilke writes. Constantly he tries to impress upon the young poet that the road to greatness is a difficult, lonely path, and that any meandering towards what is easy is destined to lead to failure or mediocrity. 'It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.' In the Bukowski poem How to be a Good Writer, he examines the life of those he considers great and asks : remember the old dogs who fought so well: Hemingway, Celine, Dostoevsky, Hamsun. If you think they didn't go crazy in tiny rooms just like you're doing now without women without food without hope then you're not ready. This is merely a more blunt and coarse explanation of Rilke's own sentiments. While it may seem a frightening truth, that we must always take the hard road, and that we must seek solitude in ourselves to mine the gold buried within us, that we may reach a point of near-madness, he presents it as such a beautiful gift, a place of inner turmoil that is bliss to the writer because it is how language is able to take root in our souls and grow. 'What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours - that is what you must be able to attain. To be solitary as you were when you were a child, when the grownups walked around involved with matters that seemed large and important because they looked so busy and because you didn't understand a thing about what they were doing.'Rilke advises that childhood is one of the richest places to seek ourselves and our inspirations. Not only to call forth our dusty memories and let language polish and remold them into something remarkable, but to use a childlike 'not-understanding' to best examine the world. 'Why should you want to give up a child's wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not-understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from. What really stood out to me about Rilke was his utter humbleness. Rilke responds to Kappus as if Kappus were the most important person in the world, and he begins each letter with an honest apology for the delay in his responses. Rilke remains ever humble in his words, and though he offers brilliant, shining insights, suggestions and long investigations on a variety of topics beyond writing (God, love - especially his distaste for those who mistake lust for love and how it damages the artistic heart, Rome, paintings, etc.), he never asserts himself as anything but a man with no answers, only direction. He reminds Kappus 'Don't think the person who is trying to comfort you now lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes give you pleasure. His life has much trouble and sadness…'. We all face our anxieties day by day, and even those we look up and even idolize were never able to reach perfection. We are all human, and Rilke manages to both send us reaching for the heavens while still remaining firmly grounded here on the Earth. This is a fantastic short collection for anyone with any interest in writing. It is one of the most beautifully empowering books I have ever read and reminds the reader of the mindset they must accept in order to let the arts flourish in the soil of their souls. Whatever the topic he discusses, it is wholly pleasant to be immersed in the flow of his writing - each word is a warm embrace. While the letters are intended for Mr. Kappus alone, and his side of the conversation is missing, the message is universal. From the man who wrote some of the finest poetry of the 20th century, this book should be read by everyone before they pick up a pen to write (the same goes for Sorrentino's Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, but that is a discussion for another time). I'm surprised this isn't required reading in all freshman college literature courses. This is truly a gift of writing, it sustained a smile across by face the entire time. 5/5 'Just the wish that you may find in yourself enough patients to endure and enough simplicity to have faith; that you may gain more and more confidence in what is difficult and in your solitude among other people. And as for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.' ¹ For more on the corruption of literature through any attempt at interpretation or criticism, I highly recommend reading Susan Sontag essay Against Interpretation (thank you to Mike for showing me this essay). Also, for further reading on the distortion of Rilke's words, William H. Gass has his take on translating the great poet: Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation

Review # 2 was written on 2017-08-26 00:00:00 Lisa Vanschuyver 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