I’ll share the few which resonates with me and list my own thoughts under each, so I can go back to them for easy reference: Relatable, wise, contemplative reflections and advices are aplenty.
It is, as the self-explanatory title suggests, an array of letters to an aspiring poet named Mr Kappus. Ezra Pound once said in his essay A Retrospect, “When Shakespeare talks of the ‘ Dawn in russet mantle clad’ he presents something which the painter does not present.Letters to a Young Poet is officially one of my favourite reads. Said another way, and this doesn’t relegate other art forms, a painting can’t give a speech. We artists are all sensitive, but as poets, we have the power to charge words with different and rare meanings.
However, we owe ourselves solitude and introspection, especially writers. Giving up everything signs us up for something else. And I paraphrase: we are often in our own way more than we realize.Īnd that is Rilke’s point in Letters to a Young Poet. However, one thing she always said about letting go of everything returns to me. She spoke English, but her personal idiom was mystical. She spoke to me about Rilke a few times, but I also didn’t understand her so well. 5 Find A Mentorįor a brief time, I had a spiritual and poetic mentor, a woman named Leslie, of age and of many experiences. “Ask yourself, in your night’s quietest moment, ‘Do I have to write?” LTYP p. Not ironically, Rilke insists that Kappus deeply consider his aspiration for being a poet, that is, if writing is inherently of his livelihood: Those lines were written in 1923, yet ring true a century away: how are we to wrestle with the importance of embracing our own demons…making a god of ourselves? There is no answer in Letters to a Young Poet.
The beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,Īnd we revere it so, because it calmly disdains Take me to its heart, I would vanish into its Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic Rilke, in his Duino Elegies(1923), opened with the first elegy: In my experience, the act of writing is alone a solitary act that expresses some need to understand something of grave concern. It’s no question art is difficult to authenticate in our lives as a creator. Instead of critiquing Kappus’s poems, he provides spiritual guidance.
The latter seeks the prophetic advice of the former and sends him his poems. Rilke, an Austrian poet and novelist, by means of words, is approached by an aspiring poet and military cadet named Franz Kappus. This book was published during the year of The Great Depression: 1929. I feel no one illuminates this truth more uniquely than Rainer Maria Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet.
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