Letters to a Young Poet

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Things are not as easy to understand and say as we might prefer to believe; most events are inexpressible, happening in a space where no word has ever set foot, and most inexpressible of all are works of art, mysterious existences, whose life continues as ours passes away.

No one can advise and assist you, no one. 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.

Even if you were in a prison, whose walls keep all the sounds of the world from addressing your senses—would you not then still have your childhood, this exquisite, royal wealth, this treasure-house of memories?

A work of art is good if it has come to be from necessity. Its judgment lies in the manner of its origin, and in nothing else. And that is why, dear sir, I knew I had no advice for you but this: to go into yourself and to examine the depths from which your life springs; at its source you will find the answer to the question—whether you must create.

Works of art are of an unlimited solitude, and can be reached by nothing so little as criticism.

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. Do not seek out the answers now, which cannot be given to you because it you cannot live them. And what matters is to live everything. 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.

love your solitude, accept the pain it causes you, and make a melody with it.

Those who are close to you are far off, and so you write, and this shows that the space around you is broadening.

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, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But the period of learning is always a long, secluded time, and so, for a long time to come and far on into life, love is:—solitude, heightened and deepened loneliness for the person who loves.

For as we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, so it appears that most people know only a corner of their room, a window seat, a floor path on which they walk up and down. Thus they have a certain security. And yet so much more human is that dangerous insecurity that compels the prisoners in Poe’s stories to scan the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their lodging.

Perhaps everything terrifying is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants help from us.

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.