Letters to a Young Poet
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- ISBN13: 9780393310399
- Condition: New
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Product Description
A beloved classic of writerly wisdom.
Drawn by some sympathetic note in his poems, young people regularly wrote to Rilke with their problems and hopes. From 1903 to 1908 Rilke wrote a series of remarkable responses to a young would-be poet, on poetry and on extant as a sensitive observer in a harsh world. Accompanying the letters is a chronicle of Rilke’s life showing what he was experiencing in his own relationship to life and work when he wrote these letters.Amazon.com Review
It would take a deeply cynical heart not to fall in like 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 vital European poet of the modern age. Rilke wrote these 10 sweepingly emotional letters in 1903, addressing a ex- 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 wonderfully 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 make. Accept it, just as it sounds, lacking 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, lacking 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 thoughts 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 reflect.” Persons looking for an alluring image of the solitary artist–and for an astonishing percentage of wisdom–will find both in Letters to a Young Poet. –Jennifer Buckendorff
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I’ve never understood the fascination with the “wisdom” of the 28 year ancient Rilke. To me, this is reasonably possibly the most condescending work in German literature.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
In theory, I reflect this book is wonderful. It’s the timeless tale of a wise and worldly teacher sharing his wisdom with a young and innocent and admiring student, telling him to look within, to avoid like for now and seek solitude and personal reflection as a replacement for, to first study life in its tiniest and least significant forms in order to learn right beauty, etc.
My shock with this book came AFTER reading it, when I learned that Rilke HIMSELF was only 27 or 28 years ancient (!) when he ongoing writing to the young poet. For me, his age did not jive with his tone, which was that of a 85 year ancient world-weary sage. It could be he really was wise beyond his years, but I can’t help but have the suspicion that some arrogance on his part might be at play.
And then, all his talk about the young poet not seeking like, not attempting like poems, not being able to know like for some time yet – all wonderful and perhaps right advice…but Rilke himself had already married by 25 or 26, and was a father a year later. is he perhaps giving out the advice that he himself cannot take? Or seeing all his own unfulfilled (and perhaps denied) hopes for himself in the young and naive poet?
All this said, I feel Rilke was a man far yet to be of his time, and perhaps one who knew too much about himself and human scenery to ever really find right happiness in the time in which he was living. It’s just a sixth sense I get about him, and it may be off the mark, so I write this with some hesitancy – perhaps I’m incorrect!
In the meantime, I must learn more about the life of Rilke, otherwise this book shall lack a context for me…
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (Norton, 1962)
I should preface my judgment on this by adage that I’ve been misled for the past twenty years regarding this book, which I somehow never got around to reading until I was older than both of the principals therein (the young poet hasn’t yet reached his twenties at the beginning of the correspondence; Rilke is twenty-eight). Norton’s categorization of it as literature (as a replacement for of philosophy), and various rave reviews of it that concentrate on the fact that Rilke wrote these letters to a person who wrote him looking for help with his (the original writer’s) poetry, led me to judge this tiny collection of essays had to do with poesy. No, they have to do with philosophy. Rilke informs his reader that he (Rilke) is unqualified to remark on craft and technique on the very first page, and does not do so for the rest of the book. So, in additional words, I didn’t get what I was expecting.
The philosophy therein seems pretty dated forty years after that fact (and nearly a century since the letters were really written), but we didn’t have an avalanche of self-help books in 1962, many of which were probably derived at least in part from Rilke’s words, feeding us this endless stream of unbearable pap. The book can be summed up neatly in the words of a particularly memorable Monty Python song (I’m sure I don’t have to mention which), but that’s not something to hold against the book. Rilke was a thinker of the illigitimi non carborundum school of thought; while his prose does get a tad wordy in a few places, he generally sticks to the point, and his words are far more intelligent than persons of what has come since.
The Norton edition of 1962 also contains a mini-bio of Rilke centered around the time the letters were written, to give the reader background on the events in Rilke’s life that were influencing his words. Nice addition that helps deepen the understanding of what he was on about.
I just wish he’d been on about poetry. ***
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
I was recommended this book by a Creative Writing teacher at NYU, because I myself am I young poet.
The beginning has fantastic advice to a young writer, don’t write something and search for recognition, write because you have to write, write because you like it.
The rest of the letters are appealing, mainly based on solidarity, and are worth a read. My life wasn’t changed after reading this book, perhaps because I am already extremely introspective, but if it helps you expand your horizons, the more power to you! It’s a nice read.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
There are three appealing letters out of the ten included in the book. I nearly marvel why this is printed and exchanged so much.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5