Letters to a Young Poet

Part of being an avid reader involves (according to that old cliché) having lots of unread books and being gifted even more for one’s birthday, Christmas, or any other holiday that merits gift giving. In fact, I had been in a little reading slump for a while. Staring mindlessly at my shelves and rifling through my labelled book boxes, I couldn’t decide on what to crack open next. Then I noticed the stack of books next to my dresser which are all recent acquisitions and I saw it: Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, a book which I had had on my want list for some time and received as a Christmas gift.

So, you might be wondering, who is Rainer Maria Rilke? Well, he was a late nineteenth-, early twentiethcentury Austrian poet and novelist who is credited as one of the most important writers in the German language. Rilke published one novel in his life, several collections of poetry, and collections of correspondence. Letters to a Young Poet was first published in 1929, four years after Rilke’s death. As the title of the collection suggests, this work comprises ten letters written by Rilke between 1902 and 1908 to a young Austro-hungarian military cadet and aspiring poet, Franz Xaver Kappus.

Kappus, unsure of his plan to join the military, plunged himself into all things poetic and especially the works of Rilke, who had become well known amongst German literary circles. Kappus’ military chaplain encouraged him to write to Rilke which is exactly what Kappus did.

And so would begin a years-long correspondence between Rilke and Kappus. Each of Rilke’s letters tackles a particular issue that Kappus is troubled by. However, true to his eccentric personality, Rilke deviates often enough to follow some philosophical tangents. Kappus’ main reason for writing to Rilke in the first place was to receive a critique of his poetry and obtain some precious literary advice from the older poet. Rilke, however, never explicitly gives Kappus the kind of advice that he craves and instead instructs him to follow his intuition. More, Rilke gives Kappus a far more philosophical response on how to live well.

I was struck by how similar some of Rilke’s letters resembled Edmund Burke’s musings on the philosophical subject of the sublime. Rilke, with a careful level of compassion for his troubled pen pal, writes of the writer’s inner motives for writing and dives deeper into the necessity for developing a rich inner life which contributes to properly capturing the beauty of artistic creation. Similarly, Rilke offers Kappus a couple of literary examples that followed the path Rilke presents, especially Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen.

As Rilke is writing these letters, he is travelling throughout France, Italy and Sweden, so he gives his fair share of travelogue notations for Kappus’ amusement. Sometimes it is simply Rilke ranting about how dreary he finds the tourist attractions of Rome. Another theme that is present in nearly all ten letters is that of solitude. Rilke credits much of his poetic success to his solitary existence. Elsewhere, Rilke notes that the Bible was one of the two books that he always carried with him, and it becomes more and more apparent that Christianity has had a profound influence on him, especially Christian Mysticism. Rilke offers Kappus some reflections on other aspects of life including loneliness, social and career ambitions, grief, sadness, discipline, and human sexuality. These broad themes give Rilke the liberty to deviate off topic in certain letters, while in others he remains deliberate and to the point.

Since I’ve been contributing reviews to this column, one writer always seems to resurface for me, and that is Colin Wilson, the twentieth century British existentialist philosopher and novelist. I’ve often quoted his seminal work The Outsider

in which he examines the concept of the outsider in literature and society. I was introduced to Henri Barbusse (Hell) and T. E. Lawrence (Seven Pillars of Wisdom) through Wilson and (surprise! surprise!) it was through Wilson that I learned of Rainer Maria Rilke.

As an introduction to Rilke, I highly recommend Letters to a Young Poet as the ideas are quite accessible and offer an excellent starting point into understanding how he views literature, the process of writing, and the practice of artistic creation. As I noted earlier, Letters to a Young Poet

was first published in 1929; however, these were only the letters that Rilke sent to Kappus. It was only in 2017 that Kappus’ original letters to Rilke were found in the Rilke archive and subsequently were translated into English and published with Rilke’s letters in 2020. While this more complete publication is desirable, I would suggest reading the original publication of only Rilke’s ten letters as readers will gain a more direct window into Rilke’s existentialism.

If you would like to read

Young Poet, contact the library.