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Letters to a Young Poet

Letters to a Young Poet

Rainer Maria Rilke Original title Briefe an einen jungen Dichter (German, 1929)

Letters to a Young Poet is a collection of ten letters written by Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke to Franz Xaver Kappus , a 19-year-old officer cadet at the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt. Rilke, the son of an Austrian army officer, had studied at the academy's lower school at Sankt Pölten in the 1890s. Kappus corresponded with the popular poet and author from 1902 to 1908 seeking his advice as to the quality of his poetry, and in deciding between a literary career or a career as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army. Kappus compiled and published the letters in 1929—three years after Rilke's death from leukemia.

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Source: Letters to a Young Poet

“Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them … the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Source: Letters to a Young Poet

“No experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Three (23 April 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“Embrace your solitude and love it. Endure the pain it causes, and try to sing out with it. For those near to you are distant…”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Source: Letters to a Young Poet

“No one can advise or help you — no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter One (17 February 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths where your life wells forth.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter One (17 February 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“It must be immense, this silence, in which sounds and movements have room, and if one thinks that along with all this the presence of the distant sea also resounds, perhaps as the innermost note in this prehistoric harmony, then one can only wish that you are trustingly and patiently letting the magnificent solitude work upon you, this solitude which can no longer be erased from your life; which, in everything that is in store for you to experience and to do, will act as an anonymous influence, continuously and gently decisive, rather as the blood of our ancestors incessantly moves in us and combines with our own to form the unique, unrepeatable being that we are at every turning of our life.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Ten (26 December 1908)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Four (16 July 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“Read as little as possible of literary criticism - such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Three (23 April 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“Through such impressions one gathers oneself, wins oneself back from the exacting multiplicity, which speaks and chatters there (and how talkative it is!), and one slowly learns to recognize the very few Things in which something eternal endures that one can love and something solitary that one can gently take part in.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

About Rome.
Letter Five (29 October 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“Young people -it is obvious -cannot achieve such a relationship, but they can, if they understand their life properly, grow up slowly to such happiness and prepare themselves for it. They must not forget, when they love, that they are beginners, bunglers of life, apprentices in love- must learn love, and that like all learning wants peace, patience, and composure.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

On young couples who have not yet matured enough to recognize and respect each other's solitude
Letter Seven (14 May 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“If only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Eight (12 August 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become world, to become world for himself for another's sake. It is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Seven (14 May 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of all things and build Him. Even with the trivial, with the insignificant (as long as it is done out of love) we begin, with work and with the repose that comes afterward, with a silence or with a small solitary joy, with everything that we do alone, without anyone to join or help us, we start Him whom we will not live to see, just as our ancestors could not live to see us. And yet they, who passed away long ago, still exist in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time. Is there anything that can deprive you of the hope that in this way you will someday exist in Him, who is the farthest, the outermost limit?”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Six (23 December 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism : they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter One (17 February 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maid, freed of all false feelings and reluctances, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will come together as human beings.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Four (16 July 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“Love is something difficult and it is more difficult than other things because in other conflicts nature herself enjoins men to collect themselves, to take themselves firmly in the hand with all their strength, while in the heightening of love the impulse is to give oneself wholly away.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Seven (14 May 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“Sex is difficult; yes. But those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious. If you just recognize this and manage, out of yourself, out of your own talent and nature, out of your own experience and childhood and strength, to achieve a wholly individual relation to sex (one that is not influenced by convention and custom), then you will no longer have to be afraid of losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your dearest possession.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Four (16 July 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Seven (14 May 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Eight (12 August 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

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