Letters to a Young Poet

by Rainer Maria Rilke

book data

3,624 ratings, 4.35 average rating, 399 reviews (more data...)

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2		2%
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published

May 8th 2002 (first published 1924) by Dover Publications

binding

Paperback, 80 pages

isbn

0486422453 (isbn13: 9780486422459)

description

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 slend...more

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09/04/08

Ashley rated it:

(review of isbn 0393310396)

Read in June, 2005

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves… do not seek the answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them and the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

I feel like this book has become a token gift for graduates, along with "Oh, the Places You'll Go!". But with good re...more

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05/15/08

Michelle rated it:

(review of isbn 0140389326)

Read in May, 2008

I always underline in books, either for the wise quotes that teach or the pure beauty of the passage. About ten pages into this book, though, I gave up underlining as nearly every sentence was a combination of beauty and wisdom. These letters (to a young man he never even met!) are inspiring in their honesty, teaching to cherish your solitude, "to walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours... to be solitary as you were when you were a child, when the grownups walked around involved wi...more I always underline in books, either for the wise quotes that teach or the pure beauty of the passage. About ten pages into this book, though, I gave up underlining as nearly every sentence was a combination of beauty and wisdom. These letters (to a young man he never even met!) are inspiring in their honesty, teaching to cherish your solitude, "to walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours... 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."

A few gems:

"Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent--?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances" (70).

"The future stands still, dear Mr. Kappus, but we move in infinite space" (86).

"We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, when what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transofmred into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love" (92). (less)

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03/09/08

Katherine rated it:

This is so wonderful I just want to swallow its pages whole and die.

This is a collection of Rilke's letters/life lessons to a very young poet who worked up the courage to send him a few samples. The letters are profoundly wise, sincere and loving.

If you are a young poet, you should find a nice couch on which to swoon while reading them.

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08/06/08

Rebecca rated it:

bookshelves: classics, nonfiction

Read in September, 2008

recommends it for: lovers of poetry and language

There are works that surface time and time again in cultural circles: film, literature, music, etc. One of these is Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. The young poet, Franz Xaver Kappus, is unremarkable in this set of letters as we never see the poems he sent to Rilke, nor do we see his end of the correspondence. Yet, what Kappus realizes, and so too the reader, is that his offerings are absolutely unnecessary because we see them through Rilke's eyes. Rilke readily assumes the mant...more There are works that surface time and time again in cultural circles: film, literature, music, etc. One of these is Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. The young poet, Franz Xaver Kappus, is unremarkable in this set of letters as we never see the poems he sent to Rilke, nor do we see his end of the correspondence. Yet, what Kappus realizes, and so too the reader, is that his offerings are absolutely unnecessary because we see them through Rilke's eyes. Rilke readily assumes the mantle of humble mentor, dispensing pearls of wisdom in a language that teaches the young Kappus that not all poetry is written in stanzas.

One wonders if Rilke was indeed writing to the world. His replies to Kappus are lofty but sincere, and filled with passages that seem destined for quotation:

"Do not search now for the answers which cannot be given you because you could not live them. It is a matter of living everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, one distant day live right into the answer."

For Rilke, bite-size gifts of mature sophistry (in the Classical sense of the word) will not suffice. In these letters to Kappus, Rilke seizes the opportunity to work out his own philosophy through provocative and probing questions. We learn that Kappus, during the course of his military service, has lost faith in God, and Rilke asks him, "Is it not much rather the case that you have never yet possessed him? ... Do you believe a child can hold him, him whom men bear only with difficulty, whose weight bows down on the aged?" Rilke is ready to be not only a literary mentor, but a theological counselor.

No subject is taboo for Rilke, who quite readily addresses sexual intimacy as he does some rather unconventional thoughts about women:

"Surely women, in whom life tarries and dwells more immediately, fruitfully and confidently, must have become fundamentally more mature human beings, more human human beings, than light man, whom the weight of no body's fruit pulls down beneath the surface of life, who, conceited and rash as he is, underrates what he thinks he loves."

Even in his criticisms of Kappus (both of his work and his character) he is ever gentle, crafting his words with the care of both poet and teacher. He is self-effacing, but sure in his prose. He tells the young Kappus: "And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become aware, it must become criticism." However, in the four year gap between the letter that contained those words and what would be his last letter to Kappus, we see that his final offering is tinged by reality and somewhat removed from the more romantic musings of his earlier letters:

"Art too is only a way of living, and one can prepare for it, living somehow, without knowing it; in everything real one is a closer, nearer neighbour to it than in the unreal semi-artistic professions which, while they make show of a relatedness to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art, as for instance the whole of journalism does, and almost all criticism and three quarters of what calls itself and likes to be called literature. I am glad, in a word, that you have overcome the danger of ending up there, and remain solitary and courageous somewhere in a raw reality."

As the translator comments, Kappus did indeed end up "there," publishing several "cheap popular novels." But in the end, the debt to Kappus is greater than his debt to, or at least reverence for, Rilke. The letters capture the spirit of a man, not yet old, but weathered by experience. In Kappus' military station Rilke saw much of himself, having been pressured to enter a military academy at a young age. We get a sense that Rilke is writing to a younger version of himself, encouraging the hope and youth that inspired him to write in his poem, "To Celebrate Myself":

I long to be a garden at whose fountains
my thronging dreams would pluck themselves new blooms.

A reader of Rilke's letters will indeed be ready to grasp a garden full of blooms.(less)

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02/15/08

May rated it:

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in February, 2008

rainer maria rilke is a name i've been admiring for years without ever attempting to even pronounce it. "rainer maria rilke", i don't know why but all these letters placed together look perfect to me. a small poem in itself. as when neil wrote "two sun nine".
briefly about the letters:
something i wish i had read when i was fifteen or so, not that his advices are not pertinent anymore, but that it would have been quite beneficial at the time to hear them, reassuri...more rainer maria rilke is a name i've been admiring for years without ever attempting to even pronounce it. "rainer maria rilke", i don't know why but all these letters placed together look perfect to me. a small poem in itself. as when neil wrote "two sun nine".
briefly about the letters:
something i wish i had read when i was fifteen or so, not that his advices are not pertinent anymore, but that it would have been quite beneficial at the time to hear them, reassuring, motivating, enlightening.
also that at times i could hardly focus on the reading because my brain was too stimulated by what i had just read, and wandered on to thinking about future projects. very inspiring in this way.

here are two of my favorite passages:
"But please, ask yourself whether these large sadnesses haven't rather gone right through you. Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad. The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of. If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, 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."

(remember this below was written in 1904)
"...Women, in whom life lingers and dwells more immediately , more fruitfully, and more confidently, must surely have become riper and more human in their depths than light, easygoing man, who is not pulled down beneath the surface of life by the weight of any bodily fruit and who, arrogant and hasty, undervalues what he thinks he loves. This humanity of woman, carried in her womb through all her suffering and humiliation, will come to light when she has stripped off the conventions of mere femaleness in the transformations of her outward status, and those men who do not yet feel it approaching will be astonished by it. Someday (and even now, especially in the countries of northern Europe, trustworthy signs are already speaking and shining), someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only of life and reality: the female human being.

This advance (at first very much against the will of the outdistanced men) will transform the love experience, which is now filled with error, will change it from the ground up, and reshape it into a relationship that is meant to be between one human being and another, no longer one that flows from man to woman. And this more human love (which will fulfill itself with infinite consideration and gentleness, and kindness and clarity in binding and releasing) will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other."(less)

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09/05/07

Lani Barcenas rated it:

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in January, 1994

recommends it for: everyone who seeks self-understanding and self-awareness

I was first acquainted with this book through an excerpt I heard in the tape of Beauty and the Beast, Love and Hope. It goes: "How should we be able to forget those ancient myths, those myths about dragons that at thelast moment turn into princesses. Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses,who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrble is, in its deepest being, something helpless that wants help from us. So you must not be frightened when ...more I was first acquainted with this book through an excerpt I heard in the tape of Beauty and the Beast, Love and Hope. It goes: "How should we be able to forget those ancient myths, those myths about dragons that at thelast moment turn into princesses. Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses,who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrble is, in its deepest being, something helpless that wants help from us. So you must not be frightened when a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen. Or a restiveness, like light and cloud shadows passes over your hand, and over all you do. You must think that life has not forgotten you. That it holds you in its hands. It will not let you fall."

That was one of my favorites in the tape, but that time I didn't know who wrote it. I would spend several hours poring over poetry books in bookstores to find out who wrote those beautiful and uplifting words. Then, I heard that excerpt again in a priest's sermon, one time when I was attending mass. The priest was talking about despair and darkness and he quoted those same words, saying it was written by Rainier Maria Rilke, one of Pope John Paul II's favorite poets. I found him in a church!

I eventually found Letters to a Young Poet and read the entire book straight. Reading it felt like being thirsty for so long and finally able to drink. You just want to drink and drink and drink. Most of what he wrote echoed what I have thought before, but was never sure whether those thoughts were right, or if they made sense in the real world. I especially like the part about the joys and pains of solitude, which I totally agree with. Others, I still did not understand, due to my own inexperience in life then. I was at the point of my life where I was starting to be independent, and was figuring out the direction I wanted to take.

From that time on, when I felt confused or sad or depressed about things, I would read Letters and find a profound consolation. Reading somebody's thoughts which almost echoes one's own, makes one feel less alone.

As I grew older and wiser, everytime I read Letters, it was like opening different doors of understanding. The words are the same, but it seems like he speaks to you in different ways, depending on your level of consciousness and comprehension. What is consistent, though, is the gentle comfort his words bring. (less)

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05/11/07

Matthew Kiel rated it:

Letters to A Young Poet is a correspondence between Rainer Maria Rilke (German lyrical poet) and Franz Xaver Kappus (A young struggling student). I was given this book by a good friend while I was teaching English in Belmead, TX (a small urban community north of Waco). This book came to me in a time when I was struggling with life and needed some encouragement to show me that what I was doing was needed and necessary. This book gave me that and more.

The dialogue between these tw...more

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10/15/07

Daniel rated it:

(review of isbn 0393310396)

Read in April, 2008

recommends it for: everyone

Irony: Don't let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments. When you are fully creative, try to use it, as one more way to take hold of life. Used purely, it too is pure, and one needn't be ashamed of it; but if you feel yourself becoming too familiar with it, if you are afraid of this growing familiarity, then turn to great and serious objects, in front of which it becomes small and helpless. Search into the depths of Things: there, irony never descends - and when you a...more

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07/30/08

Denis rated it:

(review of isbn 1577311558)

bookshelves: poetry

Read in August, 2008

recommended to Denis by: Britannie Bond

I started reading this book with the expectation that I would work my way through it quickly, but I ended up being driven through each letter by a hunger that had me finishing the whole thing in an hour. Among the many effects it had on me, I was left feeling humbled by the depth of what was able to express. He went far beyond simply addressing the concerns of how to be a true artist (though his insights in that respect were priceless), and he touched various inarticulate threads of my spirit wi...more

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03/24/08

Mary Katherine McMullen rated it:

(review of isbn 0393310396)

Read in March, 2008

What I liked the most about this book is that in nearly every letter to the young poet, Rilke promotes the poet to search himself and thrive in his own solitude. Rilke's letters of honesty to the young poet resound with me because he advises the poet but does not demand that his young protege do anything other than embrace all that solitude brings to him, to understand the difficulty of solitude, and to realize that the difficult is more fulfilling than any other endevour the young poet could ...more

Like this review? yes (1 person liked it)

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05/28/07

Sarah rated it:

(review of isbn 0393310396)

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in May, 2007

recommends it for: anyone and everyone, even if you aren't an aspiring poet

"have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. and the point is to live everything. live the question now. perhaps then, some day far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."

I can find inspi...more

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06/05/09

Rebecca rated it:

(review of isbn 1577311558)

bookshelves: autobiographical, classics, girly, horrible, intellectual, non-fiction, poetry, pompous

Read in June, 2009

recommends it for: no one

Letters to a Young Poet is one of those books that is so bad that I have to take notes while reading it to keep track of all the things I don't like about it.

This book is a collection of letters that the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to a young man, between 1903 and 1908, who had asked Rilke for advice on how to become a good poet. Not having read any of Rilke's poetry before, I'm not really in a fit position to pass judgment on how worthy Rilke was of the young man's admiration and...more Letters to a Young Poet is one of those books that is so bad that I have to take notes while reading it to keep track of all the things I don't like about it.

This book is a collection of letters that the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to a young man, between 1903 and 1908, who had asked Rilke for advice on how to become a good poet. Not having read any of Rilke's poetry before, I'm not really in a fit position to pass judgment on how worthy Rilke was of the young man's admiration and trust, but based on Rilke's replies to the young man (named Kappus), as well as the brief biography of Rilke provided by the editor, I feel fully justified in not liking the man.

In a nutshell, Rilke is the biggest whiner to ever have walked the earth. There is nothing that this man won't complain about. "Italy is hot in the summer! I don't like getting headaches! Being an artist is the only worthy career, but it's really hard! Not having a constant source of free money is a real bummer! Boarding school was horrible! I am so weary of the world (he was 28 at the time)! Paris is loud! People won't leave me alone to revel in my solitary greatness! Did I mention that Paris is loud?" The man read Job every night before going to bed because he felt so whiny. Rilke, to judge from these letters and from the biography of him at the end of the book, was a smug, priggish, pompous, self-absorbed, sentimental, frivolous man who was constantly making lame excuses for his lack of accomplishments and constantly fretting and stalling rather than actually working. He would spend days in the Paris libraries, feeling important and pompous, but nothing productive ever came of it. He became closely acquainted with the sculptor Rodin, but his relationship with the man was a sycophantic one.

He would sit for months on end in little apartments – in Russia, Paris, Rome – and sit there droning on and on about how noble and courageous it is to live a life of manly solitude, but how lonely this made him feel, and how art is so hard, but that hard things are good. He was constantly complaining about how hard it was to be solitary, yet this solitude was largely self-inflicted, since he made it a habit early on to ignore his wife and daughter, whom he had sent off to live with her grandparents. Rilke had himself been sent off to boarding school as a child and had hated it, but apparently he was too self-absorbed to realize that he was doing essentially the same thing to his daughter. He also whined about being poor, yet somehow he managed to find the funds to travel around the world for most of his 20s. He was physically weak and apparently fell sick every couple of months for some reason, but it's hard to stifle the suspicion that he was just being a huge hypochondriac, because lying in bed reading because you're "sick" is a lot easier than actually getting up every day and writing.

Rilke claimed that three-quarters of all literature is crap, and that all of journalism, art history, and literary criticism are crap, and yet he himself admitted that he had little formal education and wasn't qualified to pass judgment on any subject. His letters are full of purple prose and lofty, sentimental, patronizing clichés. He also partakes of all the textbook features of the Romanticism movement: fetishization of Nature and the demonization of the city; disdain for convention and the status quo, despite the unwillingness to actually do without the privileges it offers; patronizingly deigning to extend equality to women (all the while continuing to essentialize and stereotype them); self-seriousness, earnestness, and lack of playfulness in everything, even in things that are supposed to be fun (he claimed that "everything is serious"); the oversensitive, precious, dainty affectations of worldliness (he thought the Venus de Milo was "too modern" and that Rome was full of "disfigured and dilapidated things"); an overbearing, sentimental, slavish adherence to religion; the glorification of masochism and suffering for the sake of suffering; timidity, self-absorption, and awkwardness in his relationships; the romantic valorization of death; and the luxury of being lazy and doing nothing all day but passing opinions on various topics and gazing at trees. He also had a bad habit of starting grand projects and never finishing them – usually for some pathetic reason, such as "I can simply never work in the summer months."

I leave you with a quote, which I think sums up how I feel about Rilke:

"Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us."

(less)

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02/13/09

David rated it:

(review of isbn 1577311558)

Read in February, 2009

"Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live with them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

"If your everyday life appears ...more

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05/26/09

Kat rated it:

My first encounter with Rilke! This is a short collection of letters that he wrote to an aspiring and admiring poet. Interestingly, the collection only presents Rilke's letters, but not the other poet's, but they are interesting enough on their own.
He has so many beautiful ideas. My first impression was how reminiscent his writing was of Sufi mystic writing and then I discovered that people call Rilke a Christian mystic. So, apparently I just like mystics.
I enjoyed how he expressed...more

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06/07/09

Lena rated it:

Read in June, 2009

I began reading this very short book 3.5 years ago and never got past the first letter...distracted by other books. I started into it again 2 years ago but since my mind had been shrouded in a fog of chemo... Since then it had been sitting by my bedside waiting patiently for me to take interest again. Recently in a conversation with a wise new friend, the book came up. I have read it now twice, since traveling to Vienna. I needed to be able to take heed of Rilke's wisdom. Although not-so-young,...more

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10/22/08

Chepedaja rated it:

(review of isbn 3458084061)

Read in November, 2008

Ich glaube, daß fast alle unsere Traurigkeiten Momente der Spannung sind, die wir als Lähmung empfinden, weil wir unsere befremdeten Gefühle nicht mehr leben hören. Weil wir mit dem Fremden, das bei uns eingetreten ist, allein sind, weil uns alles Vertraute und Gewohnte für einen Augenblick fortgenommen ist; weil wir mitten in einem Übergang stehen, wo wir nicht stehen bleiben können. Darum geht die Traurigkeit auch vorüber: das Neue in uns, das Hinzugekommene, ist in unser Herz eingetre...more

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02/03/09

Nancy rated it:

Read in July, 1999

I found this book to be somewhat different than what I expected. Although I like and agree with Rilke's advice to the young poet about the value of being solitary and trusting one's own instincts rather than relying on outside criticsm, I was disappointed in not finding more concrete advice. I guess we all want a magic answer. I was surprised to learn of his association with Rodin, not having realized what a profound affect the sculptor had on him. It was also interesting to learn of his rat...more

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01/06/08

Meadow rated it:

I've read this little book for inspiration so many times that it now has a coffee-stain halo on the cover.

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02/19/08

Britannie Bond rated it:

Read in July, 2008

READ. IT. NOW.

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09/21/08

Tim rated it:

A friend gave me this book in college, and its sweeping pronouncements and almost melodramatic meditations on the anguish and triumph of the young artist seem to fit that time period of my life (or anyone's life) perfectly. Picking it up again so many years later, one can see some of its faults more clearly, but it still contains a lot of really interesting observations.

Especially compelling to me is Rilke's view of the solitude of the artist, and what this might mean about how the ...more

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"... keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer. -Letter One" More quotes...