Product Description

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4179 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 80 pages

Amazon.com
It would take a deeply cynical heart not to fall in love with Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. At the end of this millennium, his slender book holds everything a student of the century could want: the unedited thoughts of (arguably) the most important European poet of the modern age. Rilke wrote these 10 sweepingly emotional letters in 1903, addressing a former student of one of his own teachers. The recipient was wise enough to omit his own inquiries from the finished product, which means that we get a marvelously undiluted dose of Rilkean aesthetics and exhortation.

The poet prefaced each letter with an evocative notation of the city in which he wrote, including Paris, Rome, and the outskirts of Pisa. Yet he spends most of the time encouraging the student in his own work, delivering a sublime, one-on-one equivalent of the modern writing workshop:

Go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from outside.

Every page is stamped with Rilke's characteristic grace, and the book is free of the breathless effect that occasionally mars his poetry. His ideas on gender and the role of the artist are also surprisingly prescient. And even his retrograde comment on the "beauty of the virgin" (which the poet derives from the fact that she "has not yet achieved anything") is counterbalanced by his perception that "the sexes are more related than we think." Those looking for an alluring image of the solitary artist--and for an astonishing quotient of wisdom--will find both in Letters to a Young Poet. --Jennifer Buckendorff

Review
"The common reader will be delighted by Stephen Mitchell?s new translation of that slim and beloved volume by Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet . . . the best yet."
--Los Angeles Times


From the Hardcover edition.

Language Notes
Text: English, German (translation)

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Customer Reviews

Great condition, lame translation
I ordered 11 copies of Letters to a Young Poet for my graduating seniors in my Advanced Art class. The price was good, they arrived in a timely manner, and in fabulous condition. No complaints there! I didn't take into consideration, however, that different translations can alter your experience of a work of literature so very much! I did not like this translation as much as the one I am more familiar with (from Shambala press) and was a bit disappointed with this version.

Great, impassioned advice
This is a short collection of inspiring letters from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke to a young fan and aspiring poet. The letters were written between February 1903 and December 1908, as Rilke moved around Europe. The advice and Rilke gives the young man is inspiring in itself, but what is most moving is the passion with which Rilke writes. This book should be required reading for anyone entering any creative field, writing or otherwise, because Rilke's greatest piece of advice--to create something that comes from inside you and is for you, not something you think someone else will like or will want to buy--is the best artistic advice one can give.

This book is fantastic!
This little book though short in lenght packs a condensed form of life wisdom. Some of the insight Rilke writes to his friend are priceless. Rilke penetrates to the essence of a wide range issues from religious to material never preaching but more like asking his friend to truly examine his decisions in life and let no one else make his choices for him. This has to be one of my all time favorite books and it is a quick read as well.