Product Description

A beloved classic of writerly wisdom.

Drawn by some sympathetic note in his poems, young people often wrote to Rilke with their problems and hopes. From 1903 to 1908 Rilke wrote a series of remarkable responses to a young would-be poet, on poetry and on surviving as a sensitive observer in a harsh world. Accompanying the letters is a chronicle of Rilke's life showing what he was experiencing in his own relationship to life and work when he wrote these letters.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #196783 in Books
• Published on: 1993-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 123 pages

Amazon.com Review
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
"...I cannot think of a better book to put into the hands of any young would-be poet, as an inspirational guide to poetry and to surviving as a poet in a hostile world." Harry Fainlight, The Times

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.

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Customer Reviews

A Road Map to a Poetic Life
Written with a simple, elegant, and com(passionate) prose, Rainer Maria Rilke pens a series of letters to a young aspiring poet, Franz Xaver Kappus that contain a stunningly beautiful argument and plea for living an authentic life, that addresses the silent questions that exist in the deepest chambers of our hearts, the grand themes of literature, and hence life: the meaning of solitude and how to love.

The first letter gives the greatest advice anyone can give to someone aspiring to be anything. You have to ask yourself the following question: "must I?" If you answer in the affirmative, then "build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into it's humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse." That you must only judge Art by the following value, has it arisen out of necessity?

The second letter, he warns against the role of irony running through your life and one must guard against it by searching "into the depths of Things: there irony never descends."

The third letter argues that one must always trust in yourself and your own feelings. Do not fall victim to convention. Which is nothing more than unwillingness on each of our parts to not fully engage life, but rather to take what others have said and done as well-traveled roads to walk through life upon. For the person living a poetic life, "everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable...and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating."

The fourth letter argues for one to trust in Nature. We all must learn how to "win the confidence of what seem poor." A fundamental change in our mindset must occur in our hearts, a shift from convention to authenticity. We have "to love the questions themselves, as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language." The incredible thirst for quick and easy answers to life's most difficult questions must end. We have to take in the questions, which are really emotions or feelings without names into our bloodstreams. To "live the questions." He goes on to expand upon our relations to sex. "Sex is difficult." We all have to create out of each of our own unique lives an individual relation to sex and hence to our lovers, without carrying the luggage that society and convention loads us down with, then you will approach being a human being. Sex has to become more than a stimulant or balm to cover a more fundamental ache in our spirits. We should be stewards of our own "fruitfulness" to "gather sweetness , depth, and strength for the song of some future poet." (DO YOU DO THAT INBETWEEN THE SHEETS! )

The sixth letter concerns the notion of "solitude." We all create a "vast inner solitude." To walk inside yourself for hours without meeting anyone, that is what you must be able to attain. Through this you gain a child-like perspective, a great "wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn (of adults)." It is within the vast ocean of your solitude that we can truly approach and understand the dimensions of divinity that exists. How do you confront God? By being "patient and without bitterness, and realize that the least we can do is make coming into existence no more difficult for Him than the earth does for spring when it wants to come."

The entire series of letters find its zenith in the seventh letter in which Rilke takes the notion of Solitude and marries it with Love. He argues that yes "love is difficult." But that we must put our trust "in what is difficult as Nature does, to exercise our beings to their fullness." The act of Loving another human being is the "most difficult task...for which all other work is mere preparation." Each of us must "learn" how to love. To know that it springs from our oceans of solitude not from a formless merging of ourselves to another. But rather that each of us must "ripen" into individuals that can experience and give love, "to hearken and hammer day and night." To Love is to accept a "burden and apprenticeship" that allows each authentic person to grow and become rather than fall back and lose what makes them unique and rare. The ultimate aim of life is "the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other."

The seventh letter deals with the meaning and confronting of sadness. Rather than running away or fearing sadness, Rilke argues that it is something that must be embraced as an opportunity. These are the moments when something new is entering us "our feelings grow mute in shy embarrasment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing." In the face of this sadnessthe only courage required is to "face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that meet us." Not to run and cower before the immensity of those feelings and experiences, but to recognize them for what they are, an opportunity to blossom.

The ninth letter argues that we must trust our feelings. But only those feelings that uplift us entire, not by portion. Feelings that raise only a part of us, distort us.

The final letter argues for this poetic life. For Rilke, "Art too is a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it."

These ten letters show you how.

Devotional
A fine transition from German to English (A-, A+ being Mitchell's translation of the poems), nevertheless no one should be afraid of buying this particular translation. It is sensitive to what Rilke wanted to say and says it in about as good English as you could get from such magnificent language.

One of the most important books I've ever read
I have read, re-read and generally mutilated my copy of Rainier Maria Rilke's "Letters To A Young Poet". Rarely does a day go by without me thinking of Rilke's Nietzschean, no-holds-barred philosophy of the real poet. For him, a poet is no simply one who writes verses or rhymes words: it is a different kind of human being who embraces not only beauty and happinesss but suffering and misfortune. His thoughts on solitude are absolutely indispensable. Any artist or aspiring artist who has ever been in a fruitless relationship ("loss of the self" is a theme he explores almost obsessively) will realize that Rilke is writing through experience on the necessity of a good amount of solitude, both spiritual and physical, to create art. He is achingly honest to the poet with whom he is conversing, and passionately sincere. He knows that not every poet is a poet, and that some will find the Promethean task far too exhausting to actually go through with it: the real artist is the one who has no choice in the matter. His inner demons or angels will not ALLOW him to stop writing. Bukowski's thoughts on the matter are similar, as are most major writers and artist. This is a demanding, unforgiving collection of letters. Rilke has no patience for weakness or dilly dallying. But it is more inspiring than any self-help book on the shelf. This should be nationally distributed, not only for artists but for human beings as a whole.