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Copy/paste the text below into your blog. <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49473.Letters_to_a_Young_Poet_the_Possibility_of_Being?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Letters to a Young Poet/the Possibility of Being" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1170359689m/49473.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49473.Letters_to_a_Young_Poet_the_Possibility_of_Being?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Letters to a Young Poet/the Possibility of Being</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7906.Rainer_Maria_Rilke">Rainer Maria Rilke</a><br/><br/> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/18152275?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a> i'm reading this right now and right now the world around me is over 400 advertisements a day plastered everywhere, hurtful, piercing and shrill. It is needless cacophony over coffee, people stabbing at conversation- attacking it like chickens with meal. <br/> <br/>It seems no one wants to use words with any grace, in order to express a thought worth wrapping my mind around. The day can progress as an onslaught of mental litter, leaving an echo in the head that sounds like the scrape of an aluminium can getting kicked across pavement on a dark city street. <br/> <br/>And then I open this book, lift a warm mug to my mouth and just before I taste the mediocre coffee, I read this line on the first page.."your verses have no individual style, although they do show quiet and hidden beginnings of something personal" <br/> <br/>and I am reminded of everything I have forgotten that's important. Suddenly it is quieter and I recognize a kindred spirit. <br/> <br/>It is beautifully written and speaks with the passion of an idealist - these letters are so lovingly written in an era of "btw" and texting - no one communicates like this anymore. <br/> <br/>I am in the mood to be carried away by his romanticism rather than a city bus laden with ads desperate to invoke a response in me. I read somewhere that advertising is about appealing to our insecurities as human beings...that's the world we live in. <br/> <br/>My favourite quote so far: "for defensiveness and disdain are a sharing in that from which one wants by these means to keep apart....Everything in nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition." <br/> <br/>That's not even getting into his paragraphs on sex and art and living. This book is the opposite of fast food or a fast read. It is to be savoured slowly and reread. <br/><br/><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/71910?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>