Course:Letters to a Young Poet by Rilke
| CRWR 501P 003 |
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| Advanced Writing of Poetry |
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Letters to a Young Poet
Letters to a Young Poet is a collection of letters between poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and a young officer, Franz Xaver Kappus, who seeks advice on poetry writing. Throughout the letters Kappus asks of Rilke’s advice on the quality of his letters, what Rilke thinks of being a poet, and understandings of how to engage the process of writing with life. There are a lot of attitudes and ideas revealed from both parties in this collection regarding a creative life, and the following lines are what stuck with me the most.
"You ask if your verses are good. You ask me this, and have asked others before me. You send them to journals. You compare them with other poems, and are anxious when certain editors reject your efforts. Now (since you would have me advise you) I beg you to forego all this. You are looking outwards, and that above all things you should avoid right now. No one can advise or help you, no one. There is but the one remedy. Go within. Find the reason that you write; see if its roots lie deep in your heart, confess to yourself you would die if you could not write. This above all, ask yourself in the silence of night: must I write? Dig deep for an answer. And if it should be in the affirmative, if you can meet this solemn question with a strong and simple I must, then construct your life in accord with that need; your life in its most trivial, its least important hour, must be sign and witness to this urge."
-- Letter I: Paris, 17th February 1903
Rilke in his own way is extreme: the “must” underlines the need to write, a necessity which without one would live a most unhappy life. This is where I find myself having ambivalent and conflicted notions. I do believe that writers write from an urge, and like he says, writing comes from the “roots” that are in our hearts. But the act of writing, doesn’t it sometimes stem from pleasure? It might not always be an urge to express our deepest desires, memories, or dreams. Later in the same letter he writes:
“Take that fate upon yourself, then, and bear its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside."
The purity of writing which informs his decisions are noble, but I think it can only surmount to a small reason as to why we write. I think we write for reactions. It might not be a reward in the monetary sense, but we write for an audience. The act of writing whilst private in itself, the concept is public in its nature. Words are two-ways: to be written and to be read. A writing doesn’t stand on its own without being read, and every time something is read we as writers are waiting and expecting something. Is it appreciation, disappointment, agreement, or any other emotional responses? Readers’ approval of our work sustains our lives as writers, and it gives us the affirmation that we need in saying “I am a writer.” Not to say we can’t utter the phrase without approval, but it makes us feel belonged (Like what Carl Phillips mentions in My Trade is a Mystery). So how removed should writing be from the outside world?
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