Letters to a Young Poet Paperback – 27 Oct. 1993

but I'll try. This is Rilke at his best, sympathetic, tender, stunning and awe inspiring. Throw away your new age psychobabble & dip into this little beauty instead, it's packed full of gems of wisdom, and should be required reading for any would be writer, poet and human being. Even on first reading, it catches the heart, and subsequent readings just allow one deeper access to the poetry inherent in every word. If you want to blow your mind, read this!

Fantastic read

A classic that never dies.

Purchased as reading for a poetry workshop. Served the purpose.

Brilliant

In his own introduction to the Letters to a Young Poet, Franz Kappus describes how, in 1902, he was a young man struggling to reconcile his artistic ambitions with his impending military career. After learning from a favourite professor of his at the Military Academy of Vienna that Rainer Maria Rilke had once been a student at the same institution, Kappus wrote to Rilke, enclosing some of his own poems, in the belief that the poet would understand his moral and artistic dilemma. A couple of months later, Rilke wrote back and so began a period of correspondence that lasted some five years. Following the poet's death in 1929, Kappus published the ten letters he received from Rilke, wisely omitting his own side of the correspondence, as Letters to a Young Poet, a collection of thoughtful advice and kindly inspiration that still resonates more than a century after the letters were originally written.Rilke's letters to Kappus provide a marvellous window into the thoughts of one of the most important European poets of the modern age at a time when Rilke was just beginning to develop his signature style and accept that he must continue to write even though his talent was no guarantee of the financial success and respectability that he had been socially conditioned to seek. Although the Letters now speak to a wide audience, they were originally written to Kappus alone and this sense of the individual nature of Rilke's advice is a great part of the book's appeal. Perhaps remembering his own struggles with determining the course of his life, Rilke offers powerful advice for Kappus and every aspiring artist:"Go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist."While Rilke is always very kind in his analysis of Kappus' own poetry and, in fact, suggests that it is the poet himself who is best placed to determine the worth of his work, he does offer advice on harnessing creativity and recognising inspiration:"Make use of whatever you find about you to express yourself, the images from your dreams and the things in your memory. If your everyday life seems to lack material, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to summon up its riches; for there is no lack for him who creates and no poor, trivial place."As well as offering remarkable insight into the artistic temperament and the drive to create, Rilke's beautiful and emotional replies to Kappus explore a huge range of subjects with a sense of delicate and passionate sensitivity which will be familiar to readers of Rilke's poetry. Rilke's Letters contain insights on creativity, solitude, love, sexuality and other perennial aspects of the human condition that are just as profound today as when they were written. Given that the Letters were never intended to be collected or complied, it is a testament to their power and insight that Letters to a Young Poet has, since the collection's appearance in 1929, become Rilke's most widely read book.

Still reading?

A great collection of thoughts, through letters from one man to another, on art, poetry, life and how to live it. Extraordinarily timeless ideas though written in a different era. I was inspired to read this after reading "The Hare with the Amber Eyes" as Rilke had a long and fascinating correspondence with Elizabeth Ephrussi and these letters are no less riveting.