The Letters to a Young Poet were written from 1903 to 1908 by Rainer Maria Rilke to Franz Xaver Kappus.
I have the translation by M. D. Herter Norton.
This is a well-known book, often cited as inspirational by writers and artists. My notes below are points that seemed striking to me during my most recent reading of the book. (I’ll probably update this post at some point when I read the book again.)
Notes
- A quote from the ninth letter: “And your doubt may become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become critical. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perplexed and embarrassed perhaps, or perhaps rebellious. But don’t give in, insist on arguments and act this way, watchful and consistent, every single time, and the day will arrive when from a destroyer it will become one of your best workers – perhaps the cleverest of all that are building at your life.”
- A quote from the fourth letter: “… almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious”.
- Rilke writes about the importance of solitude several times. From the sixth letter: “…there is but one solitude, and that is great, and not easy to bear” and “Only the individual who is solitary is like a thing placed under profound laws, and when he goes out into the morning that is just beginning, or looks out into the evening that is full of happening, and if he feels what is going on there, then all status drops from him as from a dead man, though he stands in the midst of sheer life.” These words connect to his thoughts on nature and paying attention: “If you will cling to Nature, to the simple in Nature, to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you, not in your intellect, perhaps, which lags marveling behind, but in your inmost consciousness, waking and cognizance.” (Letter Four)
Reflections
In the ninth letter, Rilke talks about how to deal with your inner critic (the part of yourself that doubts the quality of your work). He suggests asking it to identify specific problems with a piece of work. If it doesn’t respond, then perhaps it’s best to ignore the inner critic. But if it does identify something that doesn’t work or could be improved, then that can be useful guidance. Rilke’s description suggests a long process of training the inner critic to be precise and helpful.
A question for further reflection: are there activities or topics that I would see differently if I treated them as serious and difficult?
I wonder what the reputation of this book would be like if Franz Xaver Kappus had become a well-known poet in his own right? I suspect we would now have several versions of Letters to a Young Poet: The Movie.