Book of the Month: Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

Letters to a Young Poet, Penguin Little Black Classics

Revered as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets, Rainer Maria Rilke expanded the world of poetry through new uses of scenery and syntax in a way utterly unique to himself. Rejecting the Christian doctrine, he ventured to reconcile beauty and pain, life and death, darkness and light, peeling back the layers of what it means for one to be solitary. In Rainer Maria Rilke: Aspects of His Mind and Poetry, C. M. Bowra observes, “Where others have found a unifying principle for themselves in religion or morality or the search for truth, Rilke found his in the search for impressions and the hope these could be turned into poetry... For him, Art was what mattered most in life.”

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Years ago, when one of my best friends gifted me with Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, I was painfully unaware of how important work it would become for me. It was a small book at first glance, with a classic, Penguin Little Black Classics black cover and white letters, just a little over 50 pages, but the book's title made me want to read it immediately. Letters to a Young Poet. I was young, and I was beginning to write poetry, insatiably and clumsily, with my mind constantly racing back and forth between the things I wanted to write about, and the notion of how those things would look in the eyes of those who read them. The latter was beginning to suppress the former, as I’d expected, and poetry, though immensely important to who I am, was slowly sinking beneath the surface of a personally crafted sea of judgment.

Had it not been for that particular friend, that particular time, and this specific book, my life, surely, would not be the same. For not only did it speak to the part of myself that wanted to write, but it spoke, as an autumn breeze speaks to yellowing leaves, softly and unquestionably, to the parts of me that are human - my loneliness, my yearnings, my unyielding love for the world, despite its darkness. It spoke to my own darkness, neatly folded into ribbons and tucked away inside an old box of matches I made sure never to use.

But there comes a time when we all must face the hidden in us, and let it, humbly and unassumingly, to catch on fire. Its light will surely fall on the places that need it, and out of the warmth a new life will burst into existence, one that has always belonged to us, as rain belongs to the clouds.

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Letters to a Young Poet is the only book I always have with me, for the warmth and tenderness it conveys, for its wisdom, for the candor of communication between human beings, rather than egos, and for its celebration of depth and profundity. It is a constant reminder that to be a better person for those we love and the world we live in, we have to, first, meet ourselves where we are, and learn to love ourselves there. It’s the most radical thing we can do, the bravest leap we can take, the most important art we can create, and the greatest fear we will face.

We must do it, anyway.

The book opens with the quote,

“What matters is to live everything Live the questions, for now.”

How are we, wonderful beings inclined to hunger for the truth, supposed to live the questions? Is it not our ultimate goal, our final destination, the peak of the experience, precisely the answers to those questions? Yes, perhaps it is. That alone, however, does not make the questions any less important. It is on the journey, in the shadows of each step we take, and across the scenery that surrounds us, that we learn - who we are, where our faith dwells, what love means to us. If we are living every moment, paradoxical as it may be, aware of its infinitude as well as its fleetingness, we might come close to finding out the truth. What we will, without a doubt, find out, is that everything is utterly more beautiful when we open our hearts to seeing it as it is, without judgment, labels, and preconceptions. Even great sadness. Even ourselves. And when we do so, there lies our chance for growth.

The preface of Letters to a Young Poet is as crucial and beautiful as the ten letters that follow it. It goes like this,

“In late autumn 1902 it was - I was sitting under the ancient chestnut trees in the gardens of the Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt with a book. I was so absorbed by my reading that I hardly noticed it when the only one of our teachers who was not an army officer, Horaček, the learned and good-natured chaplain of the Academy, came and joined me. He took the volume from my hand, looked at the cover and shook his head. ‘Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke?’ he asked thoughtfully. He leafed through its pages, ran his eyes over a few verses, looked reflectively into the distance and finally nodded. ‘So, our pupil René Rilke has become a poet.

And I was told about the slight, pale boy sent by his parents more than fifteen years before to the Military Lower School in Sankt Polten so that he might later become an officer. In those days Horaček had worked there as the chaplain and he still remembered his former pupil well. He described him as a quiet, serious, highly gifted child, who liked to keep himself to himself, put up with the discipline of boarding-school life patiently and after the fourth year moved on with the others to the MIlitary Upper School in Mahrisch-Weisskirchen. There his constitution proved not to be resilient enough, and so his parents took him out of the establishment and had him continue his studies at home in Prague. What path his career had taken after that, Horachek was unable to say.

Given all this it is probably not difficult to understand that I decided that very hour to send my poetic efforts to Rainer Maria Rilke and ask him for his verdict. Not yet twenty years old and on the verge of going into a profession which I felt was directly opposed to my true inclinations, I thought that if anyone was going to understand my situation it was the author of the book To Celebrate Myself. And without it being my express intention, my verses were accompanied by a letter in which I revealed myself more unreservedly than to anyone ever before, or to anyone since.

Many weeks went by before an answer came. The letter with its blue seal bore a Paris postmark, weighed heavy in the hand and displayed on the envelope the same clarity, beauty and assurance of hand with which the content itself was written from the first line to the last. And so my regular correspondence with Rainer Maria Rilke began, lasting until 1908 and then gradually petering out because life forced me into domains which the poet’s warm, tender and moving concern had precisely wanted to protect me from.

But that is unimportant. The only important thing is the ten letters that follow, important for the insight they give into the world in which Rainer Maria Rilke lived and worked, and important too for many people engaged in growth and change, today and in the future. And where a great and unique person speaks, the rest of us should be silent.”

Franz Xaver Kappus

Berlin, June 1929

Life flows through us with a great and almost unsayable beauty, though we might fail to notice. As I’ve gotten older, I often refrain from using the word ‘coincidences’ for it falters my perception of that very experience. I prefer, instead, to believe that everything, in the words of Harvard professor later-turned-famous-spiritual teacher Ram Dass, is a part of the cosmic dance - not necessarily orchestrated by anything or anyone, but far wiser and precise than our rational, bound-by-expectation intellect could ever comprehend.

The fact that Franz Xaver Kappus was at the same military school as Rainer Maria Rilke was fifteen years before him, reading one of his books to kindle his soul’s urge to write, and hearing the author's story of youth from an officer they both respected and loved, is not merely for the sake of Kapuss’ individual experience. The book that took form in that space between them - like a tree takes form between the earth and the sky - through their correspondence is proof that one person’s loneliness can be another person’s companionship, for those who read it will surely be aided on this path of continual change and longing that we all must take.

As Rilke says in the first letter,

“Things are not all as graspable and sayable as on the whole we are led to believe; most events are unsayable, occur in a space that no word has ever penetrated, and most unsayable of all are works of art, mysterious existences whose life endures alongside ours, which passes away.”

Philosophical and poetic, he emphasizes the importance of an unknown world - an ungraspable space existing beyond the limits of the material, from where works of art come into being. Drawing a beautiful parallel between the transitory life of human beings and the continual, mysterious existence of art, he speaks of these works as if they have a life of their own, and go on living, even after we are gone.

He goes on to say,

“You are looking to the outside, and that above all you should not be doing now. Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into yourself. Examine the reason that bids you to write; check whether it reaches its roots into the deepest region of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would die if it should be denied you to write.

…and if from this turn inwards, from the submersion in your own world, there come verses, then it will not occur to you to ask whether they are good verses. Nor will you attempt to interest magazines in these bits of work: for in them you will see your beloved natural possessions, a piece, and a voice, of your life.”

Had we not lived in this modern world focused immensely on creation for the sake of profit and consumption, Rilke’s words would still hold unutterable importance. But we do live in such a world, and this makes his insight only the more powerful. The growing haste of this internal need for outside validation has our entire perception of self-worth boxed up in the opinions of others, making it substantially difficult for us to express ourselves authentically. Of course, fear of facing who we are and denouncing our ingrained loneliness, which holds so many riches, has made this process of placing our power in the hands of others easier than ever.

We’ve evolved and made things easier to bear, but somewhere along that path, we got so used to not being challenged, that the challenge of getting to know ourselves has been rendered impossible. We shy away from difficult things, burying ourselves in crowds, opinions, alcohol, drugs, sex, food, and all kinds of trivialities only to not be left alone in our silence - this vast loneliness that we know is the thing that we truly are. If only we could turn the inner eye to it, meet ourselves where we are at our most vulnerable - within our brokenness, frailty, and imperfection - and allow our inner world to be born into the physical, the need to be perfect in the eyes of others would escape from us like a breath escaping the lips.

In the third letter, he writes,

“And let me at once make this request: read as little as possible in the way of aesthetic and criticism - it will either be partisan views, fossilized and made meaningless in its lifeless rigidity, or it will be neat wordplay, where one opinion will triumph one day and the opposite the next. Works of art are infinitely solitary and nothing is less likely to reach them than criticism. Only love can grasp them and hold them and do them justice. - with regard to any such disquisition, review or introduction, trust yourself and your inner instincts; even if you go wrong in your judgment, the natural growth of your inner life will gradually, over time, lead you to other insights. Allow your verdicts their own quiet untroubled development which like all progress must come from deep within and cannot be forced or accelerated. Everything must be carried to term before it is born. To let every impression and the germ of every feeling come to completion inside, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, in what is unattainable to one’s own intellect, and to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour when a new clarity is delivered: that alone is to live as an artist, in the understanding and in one’s creative work.”

What interferes (and has always done so) with the comfort that our processes of escapism provide, however expansive might they have become, is love - love of one’s solitude, stillness, path, corner of the world, whatever-colored room, faults, and mistakes. It is love of the uniqueness and unmeasurable vastness of one’s soul, known through the great, humbling practice of patience. Patience is everything, and we learn it by respectfully falling in love with the ebbs of life, not by running away from them. Rilke speaks of how this means to live as an artist, but I would argue that he also means to live as a human being.

An essential part of being a human being, besides the capacity to love, observe, think, and introspect, which are all matters of the ungraspable yet everpresent, is the capacity to feel physical pleasure and desire. It is, as Rilke says, ‘a way of knowing the world’ - one of the many we are granted. But do we allow ourselves to experience it in its most natural, fundamental state of law, which is greater than our joy and suffering, or do we use it merely as a tool for distraction and momentary release?

He observes this part of our humanity in a letter from 16 July 1903, writing,

“Physical desire is a sensual experience, no different from pure contemplation or the pure sensation with which a fine fruit sates the tongue; it is a great and endless feeling which is granted to us, a way of knowing the world, the fullness and the splendor of all knowledge. And that we receive this pleasure cannot be a bad thing; what is bad is the way almost all of us misuse the experience and waste it and apply it as a stimulus to the tired parts of our lives, as a distraction instead of as a concentration of ourselves into climactic points. Eating, too, has been turned away from its true nature: want on the one hand and superfluity on the other have troubled the clarity of this need, and all the profound, simple necessities in which life renews itself have similarly been obscured. But the individual can clarify them for himself and live in this clearness (and if not the individual, who is too dependent, then at least the solitary). He can remind himself that all beauty in plants and animals is a quiet and durable form of love and longing, and he can see the animal, as also the plant, patiently and willingly joining and multiplying and growing, not from physical pleasure, not from physical suffering, but bowing to necessities which are greater than pleasure and pain and more powerful than desire and resistance.

…the desire to be a creator, to engender, to give form is nothing without its continuing, palpable confirmation and realization in the world, nothing without the myriad expressions of assent coming from animals and things. And the pleasure it gives is only as unutterably fine and abundant as it is because it is full of inherited memories of the engendering and bearing of millions. In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive and lend it grandeur and height. And those who come together in the night-time and are entwined in a cradle of desire are carrying out a serious work in collecting sweetness, profundity and strength for the song of some poet yet to come, who will rise up to speak unutterable pleasures.”

Discussing sex, as well as food, as physical desires and ‘necessities in which life renews itself’ he accentuates the need to recognize these unpalpable parts of us by grasping all the fragments of that in us which is palpable - the carnal, the physical, the formed. Our inability, or rather, our unwillingness to connect with the natural flow of life, has turned sex - just like it had turned food, drugs, social media, and alcohol - into an argument we use to stay in discussions we’re bound to lose if we don’t recognize the need for change. Instead of changing their course, taking them to greater depths that are unequivocally more giving and enriching to the entire experience, we continue to use these stimuli as excuses not to face our darkness, not to accept our solitariness, not to be these grains of sand that are condemned to be their own individual worlds, though incredibly close to one another. As rivers engage with oceans, wholly, abundantly, lovingly, and under the pull of life itself, so we should engage in the shared physical desires that we inherit because we are a part of life, for there is a certain melody in our nature that will remain a stranger to those of us who choose not to listen.

How great could our solitude be, I wonder, and greater even our fear of accepting it, for us to feed our aches and desires with banality, rather than poetry, rather than love, rather than infinity? How arrogant could we have become, to forsake all lovers who loved, longed, and ached before us? To partake in this great solitude passed down from our ancestors to us, a continual melding of past into present and present into future is a birthright - no different from that of the birds, the poppy fields, and the wind.

Speaking of precisely such solitude in the fifth letter, written in Rome on December 23, 1903, Rilke says,

“There is only one solitude, and it is vast and not easy to bear and almost everyone has moments when they would happily exchange it for some form of company, be it ever so banal or trivial, for the illusion of some slight correspondence with whoever one happens to come across, however unworthy… but perhaps those are precisely the hours when solitude grows, for its growth is painful like the growth of boys and sad like the beginning of spring. But that must not put you off. What is needed is this, and this alone: solitude, great inner loneliness. Going into oneself and not meeting anyone for hours - that is what one must arrive at. Loneliness of the kind one knew as a child, when the grown-ups went back and forth bound up in things which seemed grave and weighty because they looked so busy, and because one had no idea what they were up to.

…Only the solitary individual is subject, like a thing, to the fundamental laws, and if someone goes out into the morning as it is breaking, or looks out into the evening full of occurrence, and if he feels what is happening there, every hint of station slips from him as if from a dead man, although he is standing in the midst of life itself.

…if there is no communal feeling between you and other people, try to be near to things - they will not abandon you. The nights are still there and the winds that go through the trees and over the many lands; among things and among animals all is still full of happenings in which you can take part; and the children are still as you were when you were a child, just as sad and happy, and whenever you think of your childhood you live among them again…”

I have, ever since I was a child, been acutely aware of my inner loneliness. I’ve always loved animals with all of my heart and growing up, this has oftentimes created a gap between me and other people - either they did not love them as much as I did, or they couldn’t justify and comprehend the existence of someone who did. Unable to relate to, and understand things we have not yet (or will not ever) experienced, we dismiss them, for it is easier to remain bound in the comfort of what is already known than to venture into something new and unexplored. I suppose there’s nothing strange about it - as human beings, we have always been afraid of the dark and the unknown.

For a child to feel this great separateness from its kin, however, it can mean nothing else but loneliness. Yet the space of loneliness holds such abundance in its essence, that loneliness has to come into being first, for that abundance to reveal itself to the one who is experiencing it. For me, it revealed the inimitable depth of connecting with animals - they’ve been my friends, companions, and teachers ever since I can remember.

However, when we open our hearts to love beings other than human beings, we make ourselves even more vulnerable than we already are. And we are, colossally vulnerable as it is.

Even now, the loss of an animal makes me feel the radical weight of loneliness as it is felt for the first time, raw, intense, and painfully real, for a uniquely true and profound relationship comes to an end, never to be repeated. Whenever I’ve had to decide to let an animal go, for sometimes that is the lone and most gracious choice we can make, my heart, unfailingly, breaks, altered for all eternity by a being that has taught me what it means to love unconditionally. And when we know unconditional love, though the pain of loss is great and everlasting, the ones who have taught it to us remain with us, even after they are gone.

So it is a difficult choice, the one of love because it asks us to put ourselves in harm’s way - to take our heart from the warm embrace of the ribs and offer it to the world for the world to do with it what it will. It is, nonetheless, a choice worth making, for love can be experienced in the most unlikely of places, beings, and relationships, regardless of the form they’ve been given.

Myself, I choose love over and over again, every morning when the sun rises, and every night when its light is reflected in the moon. It has made me more observant, more invested in life’s occurrences, and more empathetic, for once I acknowledged that loneliness, this borderless country of nothingness, existed in myself, I could also acknowledge its existence in other beings, and by doing so, partake in a shared experience and love of everything that is: plants, animals, the blue of the sky, the humm of the winds, the wavering of seas, the brokenness in human beings.

There is no certainty that the love we give to the world will be given back to us. That should not make us love the world less. This is what it means to love unconditionally, and it is a difficult, and serious thing to do.

In the sixth letter, Rilke writes,

“Whoever looks at the matter seriously finds that, as for death, which is difficult, no explanation, no solution, has yet been discovered for love, which is difficult too: there are no directions, no path. And for these two problems that we carry round with us in a sealed packet and hand on without opening, it will always be impossible to locate a common rule, resting on consensus. But to the same extent that we begin as individuals to venture onto life, these great things will encounter us, on our own, at ever closer quarters. The demands that the hard work of love makes on our development are larger than life, and as beginners, we are not a match for them. But if we can hold out and take this love upon us as a burden and an apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in all the trivial and frivolous games behind which people have hidden from the utter seriousness of their existence, then perhaps a small advance and some relief will be sensible to those who come long after us. That would mean a great deal.”

And in a later letter, he continues,

“You have had many great sadnesses which have now passed by. And you say that their passing was also hard and upsetting for you. But I ask you to consider whether these great unhappinesses did not rather pass through you. Whether much within you has not changed, whether somewhere, in some part of your being, you were not transformed while you were unhappy? The only sorrows which are harmful and bad ones are those one takes among people in order to drown them out.

…if it were possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and a little beyond the outworks of our intuitions, perhaps we should then bear our sadnesses with greater assurance than our joys. For they are the moments when something new enters into us, something unknown to us; our feelings, shy and inhibited, fall silent, everything in us withdraws, a stillness settles on us, and at the centre of it is the new presence that nobody yet knows, making no sound.

…The quieter, the more patient and open we are in our sadness, the deeper and more unerringly the new will penetrate into us, the better we shall acquire it, the more it will be our fate, and when one day in the future it ‘takes place’ (that is, steps out of us towards others) we shall feel related and close to it in our inmost hearts. And that is necessary. It is necessary - and little by little our development will tend in this direction - that nothing alien should happen to us, but only what has long been part of us.”

I hope we can remember, and make sure to remind others that when we experience the great joys, loves, passions, terrors, and sadness of life, we are, though naturally solitary, experiencing them for the sake of togetherness. When in the great silence that rises like an ocean wave amid these intensities, all thoughts and feelings hush down, the solitary presence that makes itself known is the same in everything that lives - regardless of the physical form.

Here lies our togetherness, and the difficulty of circumstance should not make us oblivious to it. It should make us transform, grow, feel, and love more deeply. That is, if we let it.

“We have no reason to be mistrustful of our world, for it is not against us. If it holds terrors they are our terrors, if it has its abysses these abysses belong to us, if there are dangers then we must try to love them. And if we organize our life according to the principle which teaches us always to hold to what is difficult, then what now still appears foreign will become our most intimate and most reliable experience.”

“I have said this before: the same desire that you might find enough patience in you to endure, and simplicity enough to have faith; that you might gain more and more trust in what is hard and in your own loneliness among other people. And otherwise, let life take its course. Believe me: life is right, whatever happens.”

Here’s to trusting life.

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