Letters to a Young Poet

Late in his life, the Czech poet Rainer Maria Rilke maintained a correspondence with a young poet, Franz Xaver Krappus.  Young Franz, on reading a collection of Rilke's poetry, spontaneously sent Rilke some poetry of his own for Rilke to read and offer some advice.

What followed was some of the most thoughtful correspondence in any language, collected and published after Rilke's death.  Franz introduces the letters with the following:

It was in the late fall of 1902.  I was sitting under ancient chestnut trees, in the park of the Military Academy in the new section of Vienna, reading a book.  I was so engrossed in the words that I hardly noticed when the learned and beloved chaplain of the academy, the only non-officer on the staff, Professor Horacek, seated himself beside me.  He took the volume from my hands, gazed at the cover, and shook his head.  "Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke?" he asked thoughtfully.  He skimmed the pages, stopping now and then to scan a few verses and gaze pensively into the distance.  Finally, with a nod, he said, "Well, René Rilke, my student, has turned into a poet after all."

It was then that I learned about the thin, pale boy who had been sent by his parents, more than fifteen years ago, to the Military Academy to become a commissioned officer.  At that time Horacek had been chaplain there.  He still remembered the former student clearly.  He described him as a quiet, serious, highly gifted young man, who liked to keep to himself and who patiently endured the stress of dormitory life.  After the fourth year he moved ahead with the others to the military academy in Mahrich-Weisskirchen.  There, however, he apparently lacked the necessary endurance for the regimen, so his parents took him out of the school and allowed him to continue his studies at home in Prague.  How the events of his life unfolded after that, Professor Horacek could not say.

After our talk, I decided to send Rainer Maria Rilke my poetic attempts and to ask him for his judgement.  I was hardly twenty, not quite at the threshold of a career against which I felt an inner revolt.  I hoped to receive solace and understanding, if from anyone, from the author of the book, In Celebration of Myself.  Without actually intending it, I found myself writing letters to accompany my verses. In them I revealed my innermost self unreservedly as never before and never since to another person. 

Many weeks passed before an answer to the first letter came.   The blue seal revealed the postmark from Paris.  It weighed heavy in my hand and revealed on the envelope the same clear, beautiful, and confident handwriting as that in the contents of the letter, form the first line to the last.  Thus began my regular correspondence with Rainer Maria Rilke, which lasted until 1908.  Gradually it became less frequent and gradually stopped because life forced me off into paths from which the poet's gently, warm, and touching concern would have liked to protect me.

But that is unimportant.  Important alone are the ten letters--- important for the understanding of the world in which Rainer Maria Rilke lived and worked, important also for the many who are growing and evolving now and shall in the future.  When a truly great and unique spirit speaks, the lesser ones must be silent.

Franz Xaver Kappus
Berlin, June 1929

Letter One: There is only one way: Go within. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. Put it to this test: Does it stretch out its roots in the deepest place of your heart? Can you avow that you would die if you were forbidden to write? Dig deep into yourself for a true answer. And if it should ring its assent, if you can confidently meet this serious question with a simple, "I must," then build your life upon it. It has become your necessity. Your life, in even the most mundane and least significant hour, must become a sign, a testimony to this urge.

Letter Two: Live awhile within these books.  Learn of them, whatever seems worth the learning, but above all,  love them.  For this love you shall be requited a thousand and a thousand times over, no matter what turn your life will take.  This love, I am sure of it, will weave itself through the tapestry of your evolving being as one of the most important threads of your experiences, your disappointments, and your joys.

Letter Three: Let me ask you right here to read as little as possible of aesthetic critiques.  They are either prejudiced views that have become petrified and senseless in their hardened lifeless state, or they are clever word games.  Their views gain approval today but not tomorrow.  Works of art can be described as having an essence of eternal solitude and an understanding is attainable least of all by critique.  Only love can grasp and hold them and can judge them fairly.  When considering analysis, discussion, or presentation, listen to your inner self and your feelings every time.

Letter Four: Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language.  Do not now look for the answers.   They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them.  It is a question of experiencing everything.  At present you need to live the question.  Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day. 

Letter Five: There is much beauty here because there is much beauty everywhere.   Unending streams of lively water flow over the old aqueducts in the large city.   They dance in the city squares over white stone bowls and spread themselves out in wide roomy basins.  They rustle by day and raise their voice to the night.   Night here is grand, expansive, soft from the winds, and full of stars.  And gardens are here, unforgettable avenues lined with trees. 

Letter Six: Why don't you think of him as the coming one, who has been at hand since eternity, the future one, the final fruit of a tree, with us as its leaves? What is keeping you from hurling his birth into evolving times and from living your life as though it were one painful beautiful in the history of a great pregnancy?

Letter Seven: To love is also good, for love is difficult. For one human being to love another is perhaps the must difficult task of all, the epitome, the ultimate test. It is that striving for which all other striving is merely preparation. For that reason young people -- who are beginners in everything -- cannot yet love; they do not know how to love. They must learn it. With their whole being, with all strengths enveloping their lonely, disquieted heart, they must learn to love -- even while their heartbeat is quickening. However, the process of learning always involves time set aside for solitude. Then to love constantly and far into a lifespan is indeed aloneness, heightened and deepened aloneness for one who loves.

Letter Eight: And this is the reason the sadness passes: the something new within us, the thing that has joined us, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer there either-- it is already in the blood. And we do not find out what it was. One would easily make us believe that nothing happened; and yet we have been changed, as a house is changed when a guest has entered it.

Letter Nine: Your doubt can become a good attribute if you discipline it. It must become a knowing; it must become the critic. Ask it, as often as it wiches to spoil something, why something is ugly. Demand proof of it, test it, and you will find it perhaps perplexed and confused, perhaps also in protest. But don't give in; demand arguments. Act with alertness and responsibility, each and every time, and the day will come when doubt will change from a destroyer to become one of your best fellow-workers, perhaps the wisest of all that have a part in building your life.

Letter Ten: Art also is only a way of life, and we can, no matter how we live, and without knowing it, prepare ourselves for it. With each encounter with truth one draws nearer to reaching communion with it, more so than those in unreal, half-artistic careers-- by pretending proximity to are, they actually deny and attack the existence of all art. All those in the field of journalism and nearly all the critics do it, as well as three-fourths of those engaged in literature or who wish to call it that.

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