Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rillke

I was just a year out of university when I was in a downtown Philadelphia book store and picked up a slender volume entitled Letters to a Young Poet. I read it over and over and the advice I found there helped me in my struggle through young adulthood. Forty years have passed, and I was curious to read this new translation and commentary of the Letters from the perspective of maturity.

Anita Barrows is a translator and poet, a professor of psychology and a clinical psychologist. Joanna Macy is a professor of philosophy and scholar of Buddhism, systems thinking, and deep ecology. Their commentary offers interesting psychological and social insights into the letters.

Rilke was himself a young poet of twenty-seven when cadet Franz Xaver Kappus wrote and asked him to read his poetry and for advice. Kappus had learned that Rilke had attended the his military academy and hoped for advice as he endeavored to be a poet while in the military.

Rilke had been sent to the academy because his father wanted to remove him from his mother's influence. She had given him a girl's name, Rene Maria, and put him in dresses. His father decided that he needed toughening up to prepare for a man's life.

Rilke responded to Kappus by warning that no one, nothing external, could advise him; he must look within for the answers, and in the process, he must embrace the unknown and that which is terrifying.

If his work and peers provided little inspiration, he told Kappus, "If your daily life seems to bleak--don't blame it--blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its wealth." And if all else fails, there was his childhood, "that deep well of memories."

Letter Four includes one of my favorite lines, "have patience with all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like closed rooms, like books written in a foreign language." He continues to advise not to seek the answers, but to live into them. 

Rilke had been influenced by the sculptor Rodin who had taught the importance of solitude for the artist. Art required looking within and being separate. An artist does not need others:"Where there is no community among people, draw close to the things that present themselves around you; they will not abandon you. The nights are there, and the winds that blow through trees and over the lands..." 

Yes, solitude is difficult, but so is love. And love, he says, is not about "merging," the goal is a "more human love" that consists of "two solitudes that protect, border, and greet each other," a love that allows personal space and growth.

Fear of the mysterious and the unknown is also good, something we should be open to and embrace. "If our world has fears, they are our fears. If it has an abyss, it belongs to us. If dangers appear, we must try to love them...Perhaps every terror is, at its core, something helpless that wants our help." 

And he advises to "let life happen to you. Believe me--you can count on life in any case." 

Trust the process, embrace that which frightens you, learn to love the unknown, and do not look for romantic love to save you. 

Rilke's advice helped me as a young woman, and it helps me as I approach my seventh decade. For the questions have only become larger, the unknown closer.

The commentators point out that the first letter from Kappus arrived as Rilke was writing The Book of Hours, in which he "reconcieveing of God as not the image of perfection but as the sacred process of seeing the brokenness of the world as a sacred act."

They see Rilke's Letter 7, to love without merging, representing Rilke's relationship with his great love Lou Andreas-Salome, and demonstrating the Jungian concept of individuation (self-realization that rises above self-centeredness). Lou studied with Freud and became the first female psychoanalyst. 

Also, in Letter 8 ("the world has fears") they find Rilke's message foreshadowing Jung's concept of the collective unconscious (shared archetypes/symbols, not personal) which Jung wrote about twelve years later.  

Barrows and Macy have eliminating sections of the letters as pontificating, or not relevant to modern readers, or because the message was badly conceived. Those segments appear in the commentary.

The translation is clear and easy to understand. 

Every generation faces a world of terrors, every person struggles to forge a path to a whole and healthy life. I believe that the Letters are still relevant and have much to offer. 

I received a free galley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Letters to a Young Poet: A New Translation and Commentary

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Shambhala Publications, Inc.

Pub Date June 1, 2021  

ISBN: 9781611806861

hard cover $14.95 (USD)

from the publisher

A fresh perspective on a beloved classic by acclaimed translators Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy.

German poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s (1875–1926) Letters to a Young Poet has been treasured by readers for nearly a century. Rilke’s personal reflections on the vocation of writing and the experience of living urge an aspiring poet to look inward, while also offering sage wisdom on further issues including gender, solitude, and romantic love. Barrows and Macy’s translation extends this compilation of timeless advice and wisdom to a fresh generation of readers. With a new introduction and commentary, this edition places the letters in the context of today’s world and the unique challenges we face when seeking authenticity

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Roots of Understanding: Rainer Maria Rilke

"I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."

I was in my late 20s when I stumbled across Stephen Mitchell's translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters To A Young Poet in a downtown Philadelphia bookstore. I had never read him before, or even had heard of him. Soon after I started to read his poetry. I read his Duino Elegies while sitting on cliffs overlooking the ocean in Maine.

The creature gazes into openness with all

its eyes. But our eyes are

as if they were reversed, and surround it,

everywhere, like barriers against its free passage.

We know what is outside us from the animal’s

face alone: since we already turn

the young child round and make it look

backwards at what is settled, not that openness

that is so deep in the animal’s vision. Free from death.

We alone see that: the free creature

has its progress always behind it,

and God before it, and when it moves, it moves

in eternity, as streams do.

We never have pure space in front of us,

not for a single day, such as flowers open

endlessly into. Always there is world,

and never the Nowhere without the Not: the pure,

unwatched-over, that one breathes and

endlessly knows, without craving.

Generations of aspiring writers have turned to Rilke's letters. But what I most found in them was advice on how to LIVE. Most importantly, how to accept the unknown and the frightening things in life as part of life. He said that the things we encounter are not external threats, but arise from our inner selves and are part of ourselves. So we should not be frightened. If we trust the process we will live into the answers. "Life is right, in any case."

I loved his advice to turn to one's childhood as a creative source. Because of this advice I wrote several poems about childhood memories.

"And if you were in some prison the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses—would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possesion, that treasure-house of memories? Turn your attention thither."

When I included an open book on my Album quilt I thought long on what to write on it. I finally chose these lines from the Eighth Elegy. Having moved when young I found myself for years looking backwards. Homesickness has been a part of my life every since.

Who has turned us round like this, so that,

whatever we do, we always have the aspect

of one who leaves? Just as they

will turn, stop, linger, for one last time,

on the last hill, that shows them all their valley - ,

so we live, and are always taking leave.

You can read the first letter at

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/07/letter-to-young-poet.html

From Open Culture, Dennis Hopper reading from the first letter:
http://www.openculture.com/2013/03/dennis_hopper_reads_from_rainer_maria_rilkes_timeless_guide_to_creativity_iletters_to_a_young_poeti.html

Roots of Understanding: Rainer Maria Rilke

"I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."

I was in my late 20s when I stumbled across Stephen Mitchell's translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters To A Young Poet in a downtown Philadelphia bookstore. I had never read him before, or even had heard of him. Soon after I started to read his poetry. I read his Duino Elegies while sitting on cliffs overlooking the ocean in Maine.

The creature gazes into openness with all

its eyes. But our eyes are

as if they were reversed, and surround it,

everywhere, like barriers against its free passage.

We know what is outside us from the animal’s

face alone: since we already turn

the young child round and make it look

backwards at what is settled, not that openness

that is so deep in the animal’s vision. Free from death.

We alone see that: the free creature

has its progress always behind it,

and God before it, and when it moves, it moves

in eternity, as streams do.

We never have pure space in front of us,

not for a single day, such as flowers open

endlessly into. Always there is world,

and never the Nowhere without the Not: the pure,

unwatched-over, that one breathes and

endlessly knows, without craving.

Generations of aspiring writers have turned to Rilke's letters. But what I most found in them was advice on how to LIVE. Most importantly, how to accept the unknown and the frightening things in life as part of life. He said that the things we encounter are not external threats, but arise from our inner selves and are part of ourselves. So we should not be frightened. If we trust the process we will live into the answers. "Life is right, in any case."

I loved his advice to turn to one's childhood as a creative source. Because of this advice I wrote several poems about childhood memories.

"And if you were in some prison the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses—would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possesion, that treasure-house of memories? Turn your attention thither."

When I included an open book on my Album quilt I thought long on what to write on it. I finally chose these lines from the Eighth Elegy. Having moved when young I found myself for years looking backwards. Homesickness has been a part of my life every since.

Who has turned us round like this, so that,

whatever we do, we always have the aspect

of one who leaves? Just as they

will turn, stop, linger, for one last time,

on the last hill, that shows them all their valley - ,

so we live, and are always taking leave.

You can read the first letter at

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/07/letter-to-young-poet.html

From Open Culture, Dennis Hopper reading from the first letter:
http://www.openculture.com/2013/03/dennis_hopper_reads_from_rainer_maria_rilkes_timeless_guide_to_creativity_iletters_to_a_young_poeti.html