Letters to a Young Poet - Softcover

Rainer Maria Rilke

Softcover

ISBN 10: 039300158X ISBN 13: 9780393001587

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1981

Synopsis

Of these timeless letters Rilke said himself that much of his creative expression went into his correspondence, and here he touches upon subjects and ideas we recognize as characteristic in his poetry. Like so many of his letters, these are addressed to a correspondent he had never seen. Drawn by some sympathetic note in one or another of his poems, some unlooked-for response to what was in their own minds, young people were wont to write him their problems and ask his advice. In this case of the Young Poet the replies form a compact group of ten letters in which every young artist and many another young person will find understanding and good counsel.

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Review

It would take a deeply cynical heart not to fall in love with Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. At the end of this millennium, his slender book holds everything a student of the century could want: the unedited thoughts of (arguably) the most important European poet of the modern age. Rilke wrote these 10 sweepingly emotional letters in 1903, addressing a former student of one of his own teachers. The recipient was wise enough to omit his own inquiries from the finished product, which means that we get a marvelously undiluted dose of Rilkean aesthetics and exhortation.

The poet prefaced each letter with an evocative notation of the city in which he wrote, including Paris, Rome, and the outskirts of Pisa. Yet he spends most of the time encouraging the student in his own work, delivering a sublime, one-on-one equivalent of the modern writing workshop:

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. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from outside.

Every page is stamped with Rilke's characteristic grace, and the book is free of the breathless effect that occasionally mars his poetry. His ideas on gender and the role of the artist are also surprisingly prescient. And even his retrograde comment on the "beauty of the virgin" (which the poet derives from the fact that she "has not yet achieved anything") is counterbalanced by his perception that "the sexes are more related than we think." Those looking for an alluring image of the solitary artist--and for an astonishing quotient of wisdom--will find both in Letters to a Young Poet. --Jennifer Buckendorff

About the Author

RAINER MARIA RILKE (1875–1926) is one of the greatest poets who ever wrote in the German language. His most famous works are Sonnets to Orpheus, The Duino Elegies, Letters to a Young Poet, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and The Book of Hours.

M. D. Herter Norton is a publisher and translator. Together with her husband William Warder Norton, she founded the publishing company W. W. Norton & Company. Her work as translator includes the translation of works by Rainer Marie Rilke.

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1981
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 039300158X
• ISBN 13: 9780393001587
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 123