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.
