I firmly believe it to be in our best interest to have a few fundamental books that we return to on a regular basis. Life is too short to read books that don’t draw us in; just as it is not long enough to return to those great few as many times as we ought. As Seneca puts it:
You must linger among a limited number of master thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind. Everywhere means nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends. And the same thing must hold true of men who seek intimate acquaintance with no single author, but visit them all in a hasty and hurried manner.1
For me, Rainer Maria Rilke and Letters to a Young Poet (referred to as “Letters” in the rest of this article) is one of those books worth returning to regularly.2 Every time I enter its pages, I emerge renewed and creatively re-charged.
For those unfamiliar, Letters is not really a work of Rilke’s; it is a collection of 10 letters written to Franz Xaver Kappus (an aspiring poet) over six years which were never intended to be packaged together as a whole. But since being published in 1929, Letters has become Rilke’s most widely read book (with good reason).
Throughout the letters, Rilke responds to the correspondence of Kappus—a military cadet in the same camp Rilke once attended with an instructor who once taught Rilke. Thinking this shared education meant Rilke might understand his dilemma of being someone stuck racing down the tracks of a military career while his more artistic interests called him to other pursuits, Kappus sent Rilke (whom he had never met) some of his poems and asked for his advice.
What ensued was the series we now call the Letters, documenting Rilke’s timeless advice to a young creator. The advice Rilke gives Kappus speaks to everyone with a creative spark inside them—even Rilke himself might be considered among the audience of this masterclass.
Of the many topics touched on in the Letters, the two thickest throughlines are his consistent advice to seek solitude and have patience. For Rilke, these were an artist’s deadliest tools. We start, first, with his thoughts on solitude.
The type of solitude that Rilke advocates for is more than just geographic isolation; it is a solitude of spirit that seeks no validation outside itself. A solitude to be entered into and occupied—its gate guarded by feelings that make most people turn away and its space full of things unpleasant to meet: sadness, fear, loneliness, anxiety, doubt. For Rilke, as we learn in his first response to Kappus’ original letter, poetic practice not only asks for this type of solitude; it requires it:
You compare [your poems] with other poems, and you worry when certain editors turn your efforts down. Now (since you have allowed me to offer you advice) let me ask you to give up all that. 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. This above all: ask yourself in your night’s quietest hour: must I write? Dig down into yourself for a deep answer. And if it should be affirmative, if it is given to you to respond to this serious question with a loud and simple ‘I must’, then construct your life according to this necessity; your life right into its most inconsequential and slightest hour must become a sign and witness of this urge.3
Set next to solitude among Rilke’s advice is his insistence on patience in the creative process. Patience—the art of befriending the future—puts us in touch with eternity. Rilke focuses on this topic in his second letter, which contains arguably the most timeless and striking passage in the entire collection, a message for every artist in every age:
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 new clarity is delivered: that alone is to live as an artist, in the understanding and in one’s creative work.
Rilke continues:
These things cannot be measured by time, a year has no meaning, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow. It will come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are simply there in their vast, quiet tranquility, as if eternity lay before them. It is a lesson I learn every day amid hardships I am thankful for: patience is all!4
For Rilke, the artist’s job was simply “[t]o hearken and to hammer day and night.”5 To “traverse[] silently and seriously the long pathway to abundance.” If one could manage that, it was only a matter of time before a creative Spring arrived. One of my favorite stories from his personal life proves this point.6
In the winter of 1911-1912, Rilke was living (effectively) alone in a medieval castle on the coast of Italy (near Trieste). He had started trying to write the Duino Elegies but was bitten by vicious doubts that the winter would produce anything of value. Deep in despair, Rilke awoke one morning to what he viewed as a tedious business letter—the type typically viewed as an unwelcome distraction. Descending from the castle to look over the sea, Rilke walked back and forth deep in thought, preoccupied with perfecting his answer to the letter. Then something stuck in him shook loose. Out of nowhere, it seemed as though a roar of wind called out to him: “If I cried out, who could hear me up there among the angelic orders?”7
Thus, “‘The Duino Elegies were not written,’ observes William Gass, ‘they were awaited.’” Time and again, Rilke validated his advice to Kappus with the rich works of his life. Advice that he sums up in his second to last (ninth) letter:
I have said 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.8
P.S. I was in New York this past week and had the good fortune of walking past the Surrogate’s Courthouse and the David Dinkins Municipal Building (gorgeous exterior architecture) and through The Metropolitan Museum of Art (housing incredible art and statues from every era and major civilization of the world). Every time I put myself in the presence of beauty, I am moved by it. As Rilke poetically put it:
“For beauty is nothing but
the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,
and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is terror.”9
Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, Letter 2: On Discursiveness in Reading.
Abolition of Man, Screwtape Letters, and The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis; Dante’s Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri; The Aeneid by Aeneas; and Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius are a few others in this category for me.
Letters, p. 6.
Letters, p. 13 - 14.
Letters, p. 32. According to a note in the Penguin Books version (translated by Charlie Louth), Rilke uses something like this phrase at the beginning of his book on the sculptor (and his mentor) Auguste Rodin.
Lewis Hyde tells this story in his introduction to the Penguin Books version of Letters.
The first line of The First Elegy in the Duino Elegies.
Letters, p. 44.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, The First Elegy.