Letters to a Young Poet

by Rainer Maria Rilke

years and years of running and walking I am still not far enough from her,

Nonetheless, Rilke hated Paris. He felt invisible and alone, surrounded by men and women driven like machines, people ‘holding out under the foot of each day that trod on them, like tough beetles’. Their ‘burdened lives’, he told a friend, threatened to swamp him: I often had to say aloud to myself that I was not one of them … And yet, when I noticed how my clothes were becoming worse and heavier from week to week … I was frightened and felt that I would belong irretrievably to the lost if some passer-by merely looked at me and half unconsciously counted me with them.

The letters to friends are less reticent, however, and one of their surprises is how often Rilke speaks of being anxious and afraid. Afraid of what? Afraid, I think, that he might never become his own person.

He lived in fear of two false fates: either that he might end up as lost as the ragged poor who had surrounded him in Paris or else that he might succumb to the safe but numbing comforts of convention.

Book of Job for solace:

‘We are solitary. It is possible to deceive yourself and act as if it were not the case … How much better … to take it as our starting-point.’

When doubts arise, simply ‘school them’: ‘instead of being demolishers they will be among your best workers’.

Solitude was for Rilke the necessary enclosure within which he could begin to form an independent identity, a sense of himself free from the callings of family and convention. Solitude is the alembic of personhood, as the alchemists might have said. And yet its entrances seem to be guarded by feelings that would make most people turn and walk the other way – not just sadness, but anxiety, fear, doubt, premonitions of death, ‘all unsettling, all pain, all depression of spirit

To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree

Rilke offered one (the poems ‘have no identity of their own’) but then set out to interrogate evaluation itself: by what measure do we reckon a poem worthy or unworthy? Not by any measure that the outer world has to offer. Only one rule applies: ‘A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity.’ And how might a poet recognize this ‘necessity’? Only by making the ‘descent into yourself and into your solitariness’. In that isolated space, the world’s criteria drop away.

‘ordinary life … seems to bid us haste’, but patience ‘puts us in touch with all that surpasses us’. Practised in the present, patience is the art of courting the future. It belongs to becoming rather than being, to the unfinished rather than the completed. It is not so much suited to heroes as to invalids and convalescents, those who must wait.

The flowering of any creative ‘summer’ will come, Rilke tells Kappus, ‘only to those who are patient, who are simply there in their vast, quiet tranquillity, as if eternity lay before them. It is a lesson I learn every day … : patience is all!’ Patience means sitting with the work even when – especially when – nothing appears to be happening.

If your everyday life seems to lack material, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to summon up its riches, for there is no lack for him who creates and no poor, trivial place.

Attempt to raise the sunken sensations of this distant past;

to go into yourself and to examine the depths from which your life springs;

And when one day you realize that their preoccupations are meagre,

whether all professions are not like that, full of demands, full of hostility for the individual,

for the individual it is a grand opportunity to mature, to become something in himself, to become a world, to become a world in himself for another’s sake; it is a great immoderate demand made upon the self, something that singles him out and summons him to vast designs.