Charlie’s Literary Club: Letters to a Young Poet
12.02.2024 Charlie Trenerry
One of those little books that may change your life.
While not technically a book of poetry, I have always personally considered it such. First gifted to me by a dear friend from home, I held his copy with me for over a year. From a steamy record-breaking Sydney summer to a lonely, broke, below-freezing winter trip of Europe, this little book of advice held my hand. I lost Hunter’s torn and yellowed copy at a café somewhere in Paris, and, filled with regret, immediately set out to buy another. Since then, I’ve owned, read and sometimes just carried many copies and translations. Every time I open the cover I’m told the same wonderful thing: stop seeking external validation. “There is nothing less apt to touch a work of art than critical words … Try, like the first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose.” (Rilke, 1929).
At the time, this was the most poignant and truly important piece of advice and comfort I could have asked for. A young poet then myself, not dissimilar to the one penning letters to Rilke, my immediate interest was in writing advice. I suppose this is what you would expect from a book titled Letters to a Young Poet, and certainly what you will find. Beyond that, Rilke’s trademark lyricism, haunting imagery, and refreshing dose of cynicism–or at least startling realism–gives you a swift kick up the arse and a tender touch of the cheek. This comes in the form of advice on what I want to call ‘the post-creative process’. That is to say, the process that begins once the work is more or less complete. The ink has dried, and it has been sent into the world with hope and more than a drop of desperation to be critiqued by others. It is at this point in the process that our young poet receives his first response from Rilke.
In 1903, Franz Xaver Kappus, a young military student, wrote to the esteemed Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Franz was nineteen, Rainer twenty seven. This initial letter contained a small collection of Kappus’ poems (which Rilke staunchly refused to critique), and a plea for guidance, not only on how to write and succeed in doing so, but on how to live, how to be. Not long after, a reply came, and it both was and wasn’t what our young poet had hoped for. Having sought advice on being published, reaching an audience, facing rejection – all the trials one would expect to confront as a young writer or creative– Kappus had of course hoped for validation of his poems, and practical suggestions for moving forward. Instead, the pair embarked on a six-year long correspondence. A relationship which many have puzzled over since.
Kappus compiled and published Rilke's responses in 1929—titled Briefe an einen jungen Dichter in German, translating to Letters to a Young Poet. This original collection, published three years after Rilke died of leukemia, does not include Kappus’ letters, and the lack of context, I believe, is a huge contributor to the proliferation of the work. It feels as though these letters are being written directly to us as the reader. The experience is intimate, and we’re more easily able to personalise their contents and apply them comfortably and readily to our own lives. This was Kappus’ intention. The letters to which Rilke was responding were, until very recently, thought lost to time. Today however, we can read the book as a true dialogue, with the discovery of the young poet’s letters safely stored in Rilke’s family archive. We were gifted this edition in English in 2020.
“When I think that all these unsayable, marvelous, beautiful things you’ve entrusted to me are meant for me alone—that you find me worthy of sharing in these riches, meant only for the few, the solitary—I feel very proud.” (Kappus, 1929)
To this day, I credit this remarkable little book and its author with so much of my passion. Passion for writing, for reading, for life.
When you read it, please replace the word ‘write’ in so much of his advice with the word ‘create’, and anyone creatively inclined, or really anyone at all, will find themselves, suddenly, with a companion for life.
Rilke makes one consider; if you could not create, would you have to die? Not physically, of course, but would you cease to be who you are? Would you lose the opportunity to become who you wish, want or will to be?
Then keep going.
Rilke, R. M., Kappus, F. X., & Mitchell, S. (1984). Letters to a young poet. New York, Random House.
Access the letters: https://themista.com/freeebooks/rilkeletters.htm