Rilke’s Dubious Advice to a Young Poet

 

The first few phrases quoted from Rilke’s letters are followed by the English in parentheses.  Subsequent references in the body of the essay quote my rendering in English with the original German relegated to endnotes.  

 

     Can advice benefit a poet’s practice?  When writers speak or read their work or appear at signings, they often entertain questions from less accomplished authors seeking clues to literary success. Do you write at set hours daily?  Should I pursue an M F. A.?  Do you discuss unfinished works?  Since writing, like weight-lifting, is a performance activity, probably the most reliably useful counsel anyone could hear is simply to write and write some more.  Beyond that writers at all levels of experience must shape their work habits not by reasoning but by productivity.  What proves useful for one young writer may be harmful to another. 

     Most such guidance is ephemeral.  Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet is an exception, though it was the recipient, and not the writer, who chose to preserve and publish the letters. [1]  The book is regularly called a classic and Penguin, publisher of an English translation, describes the book as “arguably the most famous and beloved letters of the twentieth century.”  This opinion is not universal.  To poet J. D. McClatchy, for instance, the letters are nothing but “sententious twaddle” by a “selfish poseur.” [2]  Whatever value critics have found in the book, most have approached the letters as a source of biographical and psychological understanding of Rilke rather than for their value to aspiring authors or as literary theory.  

     While adopting a grand magisterial tone, Rilke himself casts doubt on the value of his teaching by cloaking his subject in mystification.  In the first paragraph of the first letter Rilke establishes his identity as the custodian of the holy unknown by cautioning that poetry’s truth cannot be known, and, if it were known, could not be expressed.  At the very outset the poet assures his young correspondent that most experiences of all sorts are “full of mysteries” (“geheimnisvolle”) and “ineffable” (“unsagbarer”).  The very possibility of meaningful advice is all but denied.  “I can say virtually nothing that might help, that might be useful.” (“Ich fast nicht sagen kann, was hilfreich ist, kaum etwas Nützliches.”)  The poet’s chief concern, he says, is to encounter what is “strangest” (“Seltsamsten”) and “most inexplicable” (“Unaufklärbarsten”) in experience [3].

     Having established that he possesses esoteric secrets, Rilke challenges Kappus to match his own dramatically heroic (if soi-disant) commitment to art, telling him that, unless the younger man feels he cannot live without writing, he should not write at all [4].  If he proceeds in art, according to Rilke “a particularly blessed and pure way of living” [5], he may aspire to create something “very big and infinitely important.” [6]

     Grand this is, if not grandiose, but impossibly vague.  Why should the writer be “purer” than others?  In what way is his work so very important?  This looks suspiciously like self-puffing, unashamedly camouflaged by obscurantism.  The writer works always “in the dark, the ineffable, the unconscious.” [7]  It is fruitless to search for answers [8].  If only one cleaves always to the difficult, our dragons will turn to princesses, since “everything horrible” is likely to be in fact “something helpless that needs our help.”  Apart from this mythic reassurance, the writer should not inquire.  “Why do you want to bother with questions of “where it all comes from and where it is headed.” [9]  One should, it seems, simply live the mystery and seek no explanations.

     Apart from all this self-important sublime ambition cloaked in a smokescreen of obscurity, Rilke does offer a suggestive analogy for the creative process.  Doubtless influenced by Freud, Rilke likens the creation of art to the sexual act, a comparison that in his use sheds little light on either.  His rhetoric resembles that of D. H. Lawrence when he says that in “its pain and its pleasure” the making of art is “unbelievably close” to a sexual experience [10]. 

     Rilke presents a view of sex as a mystical dynamo, distilled and ennobled in an artful thought and serving as well as a wellspring for writers of the future.     

In a single creative thought live a thousand forgotten nights of love, filling it with loftiness and sublimity.  And those who come together in the night, who embrace in swaying pleasure, they perform an earnest labor and accumulate sweetnesses, depth, and power for the lyric of a future poet, who will appear, to say the unsayable bliss.

For Rilke, lovers must “undergo in common, simply, seriously and patiently, the weight [responsibility?] of sex that is put upon them.” [11]

     The comparison is applicable as long as his only meaning is to foreground the urgency and profundity of both aesthetic and sexual experiences, and their link to pleasure.  Where the correspondence breaks down reveals Rilke’s theoretical weakness (and, arguably, the weakness of much of his verse).  For sex is likely to have more to do with desire than with beauty.  In spite of centuries of female nudes in art that conflate appetite and aesthetics, in the end pictures must be judged by the latter.  To a starving person an advertising picture of a pizza may seem the most beautiful thing in the world, but such judgements are not applicable in the realm of art.

     Furthermore, the act of love-making is altogether mutual, whereas the artist makes an object which a reader receives.  The lover has little regard for prior models, while the writer’s work will generally imply the digestion of earlier works in search of significant influence, models, and allusions.  Perhaps most decisively, the lover has no wish to create a lasting object to preserve the passionate night or the entire relationships.  Rilke’s use of the sexual analogy is primarily affective, conveying little more than the emotional intensity he feels proper to art.    

     The sexual image is incongruous with the letters’ insistence on the poet’s lofty solitude.  It is all very well to suggest that Kappus avoid reading the critics, but Rilke categorically advocates a more general isolation to the point that he begins to sound neurotic.  “You are looking outside yourself, and that of all things you must not do now.”  “Dig into yourself.” [12]  What is valid is only that which “comes out of your own will, out of some need of your own self.” [13]  His suggestion is unequivocal: the writer should seek solitude, great inner solitude, going-into-oneself and for long periods never encountering another.” [14]

     While no one will deny that reflective periods are conducive to artistic productivity, this isolation is valuable in combination with the communion with earlier writers implied by influence and the need to communicate with readers.  In particular for a novice, the study of masters and the imitation of great predecessors is valuable in any field.  The complete artistic autonomy on which Rilke insists from the start surely can be justified only with maturity. 

     Some have wondered why Rilke took the time to correspond with this youth, and persisted for years in maintaining their connection, though the poet himself did not envision publishing their correspondence.  Surely the simplest answer is that Rilke was flattered by adulation and welcomed a disciple.  His picture of the grand spiritual mission of the writer and of the deep mysteries in which he deals is surely meant to impress his young admirer.  His conjuring about poetry and sexuality is likely to be just the thing to awe the inexperienced, and his insistence on a heroic aloneness makes him sound like a very belated Byronic hero.  Virtually nothing Rilke says amounts to useful guidance; it seems all designed to promote himself in the role of divine poet.  

     Rilke wholly neglects the roles of craft, convention, and tradition, all critical to a writer’s training.  He implies in fact that enlightenment will descend on the poet is he remains quiet, alone, and attentive.  “All that is necessary,” he says, is “that we are in circumstances that from time to time confront us with great natural things.” [15]  This is hardly a formulation that would serve a learner well. 

     The present focus is on the celebrated letters themselves.  His biographers have recorded a less than flattering portrait of the artist, but that is irrelevant in the face of great poems.  Yet the defects evident from a serious acceptance of the letters on their own terms as advice to a younger artist may appear to the reader of Rilke’s poetry as well: a vague and self-important spirituality, a greater attention to the drama of his own sensibility than to the specifics of a single poem, a privileging of the vaguest of themes over craft, and an exaggerated gravity in which pleasure and beauty, though the motive of every poem, find little place. 

 

  

 

1.  These. letters, written to Franz Xaver Kappus who had first contacted Rilke while still a military academy student, continued until 1928 and were published by Kappus three years after Rilke’s death with the title Briefe an einen jungen Dichter (Letters to a Young Poet) and frequently reprinted since.  In 2017, the German scholar Erich Unglaub discovered that Kappus’s letters had been stored in the Rilke family archive all along. In 2019, he published both sides of the correspondence for the first time. Last fall, an English translation by Damion Searls appeared.

2.  J. D. McClatchy, “Antagonism: Rainier Maria Rilke,” Poetry, October 2004.

3.  August 12, 1904.

4.  "Es genügt, wie gesagt, zu fühlen  dass man ohne zu schreiben leben könnte, um es überhaupt nicht zu dürfen." August 12, 1904.

5.  “Eine besonders selige und reine Art des Lebens,” July 16, 1903.

6.  “Sehr gross und unendlich wichtig,”  April 23, 1903.

7.  “Im Dunkel, im Unsagbaren, Unbewussten,” April 23, 1903.

8.  “Forschen Sie jetzt nicht nach Antworten,” July 16, 1903.

9.  “Alles schreckliche . . . im tiefsten Grinde das Hilflose, das von uns Hilfe will,” “Wir uns immer an das Schwere halten müssen,”  “Warum wollen Sie sich mit der Fragen verfolgen, woher das alle kommen mag und wohin es will,” August 12, 1904.

10.  “Seinem Weh und seiner Lust,” “unglaublich nahe”  April 23, 1903.  These phrases are followed by a passage remarkable for its time, though having little to do with poetry, in which Rilke denounces selfish, male-centered lovemaking. 

11.  “In einen Schöpfergedanken leben tausand vergessene Liebesnächte auf und erfüllen ihn mit Hoheit und Höhe.  Und die in den Nächten zusammenkommen und verflochten sind in wiegender Wollust tun eine ernste Arbeit und sammelt Süssigkeiten an, Tiefe und Kraft für das Lied irgendeines kommenden Dichters, der aufstehn wird, um unsägliche Wommen zu sagen.”

“Um einfach, ernst und geduldig das schwere Geschlecht, das ihnen auferlegt ist, gemainsam zu tragen.”

12.  In the letter of April 23, 1903, Rilke writes “Read aesthetic and critical essays as little as possible.” (“Lesen Sie möglichst wenig äesthetisch-kritische Dinge.”)  “Sie sehen nach aussen, und das vor allem dürften Sie night tun.”

13. July 16, 1903: “Nehmen Sie das was kommt in grossem Vertauen hin, und wenn es nur aus Ihren Willen kommt, aus irgendeiner Not Ihres Innern, so nehmen Sie es aus sich.”

14.  December 23, 1903 “Einsamkeit, grosses innere Einsamkeit.  In-sich-Gehen und stundenlang niemandem begegnen.”

15.  December 24, 1908  “Und, das wir in Vernhältnissen sind, die uns vor grosse natürliche Dinge stellen von Zeit zu Zeit, das ist alles, was not tut.”