Rilke’s Heartfelt Advice through his Letters to a Young Poet

 by Saffron Irons

Portrait of Rilke by L Pasternak

Rilke’s heartfelt advice through his Letters to a Young Poet. 

Rilke, through his Letters to a Young Poet, provides the most insightful and beautifully composed advice I think I have ever read. He meditates on creativity, emotion, love, sexuality and religion in ways that seem modern for even our time let alone the early 20th century. Reading this book encouraged me to accept and forgive many parts of myself and my life, while helping me to build a sense of trust in the world. I believe it should be read and experienced by everyone.

Who is Rilke and what are his Letters to a Young Poet?

Rainer Maria Rilke was a poet and novelist born in Prague in 1875. At 11 years old he entered the lower military school, leaving in 1891 due to illness, and studying art history at university. This was where he began writing poetry. After his studies, Rilke travelled Europe searching for quiet patches of solitude in which to discover his creativity. While he did have a wife, and child in 1901, Rilke did not seem to care much for family life, and instead enjoyed the company of his own language. Rilke now has published; many poetry collections, a novel, short stories and two collections of his letters. His most famous works include:  The Book of Images, The Book of Hours,  Duino Elegies, The Dark Interval - Letters for a grieving heart, and Letters to a Young Poet. 

Letters to a Young a Poet is a collection of letters to Franz Xavier Kappus, a young army cadet and amaeture poet who attended the same military school as Rilke. Kappus, the ‘young poet’ writes to Rilke asking for advice on his poetry and general life. 3 years after Rilke’s death in 1926, Kappus publishes the letters Rilke sent to him (not including his own letters). In the preface to the book, Kappus describes how he sent Rilke his verses, along with ‘a letter in which I revealed myself more unreservedly than to anyone ever before, or to anyone since’, and goes on to explain his belief in the importance of the letters he received, for all of humanity. 

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

With that admirable preface in mind, I would like to explore some of the themes in Letters to a Young Poet and Rilke’s profound advice. 

Rilke on Creativity

Since Kappus wrote to Rilke for advice on his poetry, the main topic of the first few letters is art and creativity. His main piece of advice is purely that he cannot give advice. He believes that art is made by the creator, ultimately for the creator, and the best advice and criticism can only come from within. He advises Kappus to ‘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’. While this is a dramatic response, it represents the idea that art cannot be created when you are instructed to do so, or are doing so to earn money, it must come from a deep passion. In his third letter, he adds to this by saying ‘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’. His representation of art as a form of capturing oneself, and not something to be judged, is inspiring, and something that I believe should be carried into our altogether over judgemental society. 

Rilke on Solitude 

To build on his ideas on art, Rilke believes that the best way to produce brilliant art is through solitude. He takes a Freudian view, stating that, when creating and judging your own art, you must ‘allow your verdicts their own quiet untroubled development which..cannot be forced or accelerated’ and must come from ‘unsayable, the unconscious’. This is another of his ideas that is, I feel, needed in today’s society, as so many people are pushed and rushed to constantly create, when instead creativity requires time, and patience, to collect the ideas from our unconscious minds. Rilke is also a firm believer in the act of solitude as a form of self-love. In a beautiful sentence he states ‘What goes on in your innermost being is worth all your love, this is what you must work on however you can and not waste too much time and too much energy in clarifying your attitude to other people.’ He speaks for himself. So many of us spend our lives doing things for other people, pleasing other people when really it is ourselves that matters most, and you should never have to explain your actions of self love to others. 

Rilke on Love

The theme of solitude is something that Rilke tries to bring into every aspect of his life. He believes that solitude and a sense of self is the most important thing, especially in relationships. He is actually extremely critical of relationships, especially at a young age, although he does state that ‘To love is also good, for love is hard’. This goes with his moral: the best things in life are the most difficult, which I will come back to. In his 7th letter to Kappus, Rilke explains how young people often go wrong in relationships, and through a lack of patience ‘scatter themselves just as they are in all their troubledness, disorder, confusion’. He believes that, to be in a relationship, one must have a strong sense of self, found through solitude. In a sentence that I wish I had heard three years ago, Rilke writes: ‘but how can people who have already flung together and no longer set themselves any limits or tell one another apart, and who therefore possess nothing of their own any more, how on earth can they find a way out of themselves, out of the depths of a solitude that has already been split and squandered?’. This mirrors RuPaul's famous quote: ‘If you don't love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?”, proving that Rilke had ideas far beyond his time, ideas that we are only just beginning to actually listen to today. Concepts like this however, while becoming a larger part of our awareness, are becoming harder and harder to actually put into place. In this day and age it is harder to find time for solitude and being with yourself, finding and loving yourself, than perhaps it was for Rilke. That is not to say that it cannot be done, and this is why I feel it is the most important time for people to be reading Rilke and taking on his advice. 

Rilke on emotion (and general life advice)

Perhaps some of the most important and unconventional advice that Rilke gives in Letters to a Young Poet is on emotion. In a response, I assume, to Kappus' writing of his sadness, Rilke replies ‘I ask you to consider whether these great unhapinesses did not rather pass through you’. He disconnects the feeling of unhappiness from the young poet's worth, and rather than allowing him to state that he is sad, asks him to think of the sadness as something that passes through him, for a purpose, allowing the body to ‘alter, the way a house alters when a guest enters it.’ In his 8th letter, Rilke introduces an innovative idea that I do not believe many people would have taken on in 1904, especially in an extremely religious community. He says that ‘there are many indications that it is the future that enters into us like this, in order to be transformed within us, long before it actually occurs’. Essentially, Rilke believes that things that happen to us in the future, happen months before, inside our own bodies and minds. He can describe it much better than I can: ‘it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and static moment when our future comes upon us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and accidental point when it happens to us as if from the outside. 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’. With this paragraph, Rilke builds a sense of trust towards the future that many people lack, and he encourages us to not be fearful. This is a theme that continues throughout his letters, as he says ‘we have no reason to be mistrustful of our world’. Another of my favourite quotes from the book comments on myths and stories and the relevance they have to real life: ‘Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses, only waiting for the day when they will see us handsome and brave?’ Rilke elicits in the reader, although these letters were only meant to be read by Kappus, a sense of confidence, and reassurance that is incredibly comforting. 

Rilke on gender roles

Another new idea that Rilke introduces, is that of women’s rights and gender roles. In his letter written on the 14th of May 1904, he comments on the fact that women are beginning to imitate men, putting on a ‘laughable disguise’. At the first read, I thought he was being misogynistic, but reading what he describes later, I realised what he meant. Rilke has a great admiration for women, stating that the act of pregnancy and birth, makes women ‘more human human beings’ and that a man ‘who has not been pulled down beneath the surface of life by the weight of a bodily fruit, in his arrogance and impatience, undervalues what he thinks he loves’. Rilke states later in the letter that ‘one day there will be girls and women whose name will no longer just signify the opposite of the male but something in their own right’. It was this sentence that caused me to re-think his first statement and realise that what Rilke is trying to say is that women should not just imitate men, they should be making their own way in the world doing new and innovative things that are inherently by women and for women. While they should not be limited to motherly roles, they should also not be limited by the limitations of men. 

Rilke on religion

Included in the penguin classics edition of Letters to a Young Poet is the ‘Letter from the young worker’ this is a fictional letter written by Rilke. It is described as a ‘striking polemic against christiantiy’. The fact that he wrote this, shows Rilke’s aversion to current ideas on religion and his willingness to go against the popular views on religion. In the actual letters written to Kappus, he comments on something that Kappus must have written to him about; the topic of finding God and religion. It seems that Kappus was afraid that he had not ‘found God’ and had never truly believed in him, essentially afraid that this was wrong as so many people at this time were extremely religious. Rilke reminds Kappus that if he does not feel God in his life, ‘what then gives you the right to miss him who never was, as if he had disappeared, and to search for him as if he were lost?’. He advises Kappus to think of God as something he himself creates: ‘As the bees collect honey together, so we fetch the sweetness out of everything and build Him.’ He believes that we can create God through ‘a moment of silence or with a small solitary joy’ which is an extremely modern spiritual view, one in which God does not exist as a person who is there to help us, but as an idea that we find or even create for our own benefit and comfort.

Rilke being self aware 

While Rilke spends these letters unloading extremely profound and insightful advice to Kappus, he is careful to mention that he is not a perfect human being. He begins the majority of his letters with an apology and an excuse for not replying earlier, which shows the societal pressures that have continued and become heightened recently due to technology. Today, there is often pressure to be communicative all the time and reply quickly to others, however, as Rilke demonstrates, it is often best to put off replying until you have the time and energy to fully engage with the person you are talking to. At the end of one of his letters Rilke says ‘do not think that the person who is trying to console you lives effortlessly among the simple, quiet words that sometimes make you feel better. His life is full of troubles and sadness and falls far short of them. But if it were any different he could never have found the words he did.’ This ending proves Rilke’s self-awareness, while he gives this advice, he notices that he does not always take it himself and assures Kappus that he is not perfect. He does acknowledge, also, that if he were perfect, he would not have this advice to share. This further proves one of his main points which is that everything happens for a reason, and we should not fear negative experiences for they are crucial for growth. 

In conclusion, I believe that everyone should read this book at least once in their lives, to experience the beautiful words of Rilke. Whether you believe in Rilke’s ideas or not, I am certain that there will be at least one thing in this book that will land with every individual and alter their perspective on an aspect of life in some way or another. Rilke is a man who lived before his time, providing insight on ideas that may seem modern even to a reader today. I do not know many people who have even heard of Rilke, let alone read any of his work, and I believe that is something that must change because this book has changed many people’s lives, and will continue to do so the more it is read.