Letters to a Young Poet

by Rainer Maria Rilke

There is only one way: go into yourself. Seek out the reason that commands you to write; discover if it has stretched out its roots into the deepest part of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would have to die if it were forbidden you to write.

This above all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a profound answer. And if this should be so, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple I must, then build your life around this necessity; your whole life, down to its most indifferent, most trivial hour, must be a sign and testimony to this impulse. Then turn towards nature, and try, like a First Man, to say what you see and experience and love and lose.

There is nothing that has not been understood, grasped, experienced and recognized in the trembling reverberation of memory; no experience has been too lowly, and the smallest event unfolds like a destiny, and destiny itself is like a wonderful, expansive fabric, where each thread is made by an infinitely tender hand to be laid side by side and supported by a hundred others.

art are of an unlimited solitude, and can be reached by nothing so little as criticism. Only love can grasp and hold them, and can face them justly.—Consider

Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like any progress, must come from deep within and can by no means be forced or hastened.

To be an artist means: to neither reckon nor count; to ripen like the tree, which does not rush its sap, and stands firm in the storms of spring, without anxiety that summer may not come after. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there, as if eternity lay before them, so carelessly silent and vast.

If he loves only as a male, not as a human, then there is in his sexual feeling something narrow, seemingly wild, malicious, temporal and uneternal, that reduces his art and makes it ambiguous and doubtful.

It is not immaculate, it is marked by time and by passion, and little of it will endure and persist.

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I want to ask you, as best I can, dear sir, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to have love for the questions themselves, like locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.

Live the questions for now. Perhaps then, without noticing it, you will gradually come, on some far-off day, to live your way into the answer.

And it is not bad that we receive it; what is bad is that almost everyone abuses and wastes this learning, and sets it up as a stimulus for the tired places in their lives, as a distraction rather than a gathering of the self towards exalted moments.

This alone is needed: solitude, vast inner solitude. To go into yourself and meet no one for hours,—you must be able to achieve this.

What occurs in your deepest interior is worthy of all your love, but you must somehow work on it, and not lose too much time and too much courage clarifying your attitude toward people.

Read the verses, as if they came from someone else, and you will feel most inwardly how much they are your own.—

People have (with the aid of conventions) resolved everything in favor of ease, and the easiest side of ease; but it is clear that we must cling to the difficult; everything alive clings to it, everything in nature grows and defends itself in its own way, and is characterized by itself, and seeks to be itself at all costs and against all opposition.

We know little, but it is a certainty that will not forsake us that we must cling to the difficult; it is good to be lonely, because loneliness is difficult; the difficulty of a thing must be one more reason for us to do it.

To love is also good: because love is difficult. For one person to love another: that is perhaps the hardest thing that is handed to us, the utmost, the last test and proof, the ...

That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot love: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their powers, gathered around their solitary, anxiou...

This progression will transform the love-experience that is now wholly off-course (at first much against the will of the men it overtakes) from the bottom up, reshape it into a relationship whose meaning is from person to person, not only from man to woman. And this more human love (which, infinitely considerate and gentle, and good and clear in binding and loosing, will consummate itself) will resemble what we are preparing in struggle and pain, the love that consists in two solitudes that defend, border, and greet each other.

Do not believe that that great love, which was first laid upon you as a boy, was lost; can you say that there were not great and good desires ripening in you then, and resolutions, that still keep you alive? I believe that such love, so strong and so powerful, does remain in your memory, for it was your first deep solitude and the first interior work you have done in your life.

The only dangerous and evil sorrows are those that people carry around in society in order to drown them out; like diseases treated superficially and foolishly, they simply withdraw, and after a brief hiatus, relapse more terribly; they accumulate in the interior and they are life, but unlived, rejected, lost life, of which one can die.

And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is in sorrow: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless instant, when our future enters us, stands much closer to life than any other loud and random point in time, when it happens to us from the outside.

As so many of our concepts of motion have already needed to be rethought, so we also must gradually learn to recognize that what we call destiny, steps forth from people from the inside out, not from the outside in.

But anxiety over the inexplicable has not only impoverished the existence of the individual, but interpersonal relationships are shrunken by it, as if lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities and laid on a fallow spot on the bank, where nothing happens.

How could we forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that turn into princesses at the last moment; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us just once as beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrifying is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants help from us.

For you know that you are in the midst of changes, and desire nothing more than to transform. If some of your transitions are sickly, then keep in mind that sickness is the means for an organism to free itself from what is alien; one must help it to be sick, to run the whole course of its sickness and break through, for that is its progress.

always my wish that you find enough patience in yourself to endure, and enough simplicity to believe; that you gain more and more confidence in what is difficult, and in particular your solitude. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, every time. As

Everything you can imagine in view of your childhood is good. Everything that makes you into more than you have ever been, in your best moments, is right.

And your doubt can become a good quality if you teach it. It must become knowing, it must become critical. Question it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, as to why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you might find it perplexed and embarrassed, or even protesting.