Letters to a Young Poet Read online

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET

  Translated, Edited and with Notes and an Afterword by Charlie Louth

  Introduction by Lewis Hyde

  Contents

  Preface

  Introduction

  LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET

  Paris, 17 February 1903

  Viareggio near Pisa (Italy), 5 April 1903

  Viareggio near Pisa (Italy), 23 April 1903

  At present in Worpswede near Bremen, 16 July 1903

  Rome, 29 October 1903

  Rome, 23 December 1903

  Rome, 14 May 1904

  Borgeby gård, Flãdie, Sweden, 12 August 1904

  Furuborg, Jonsered, Sweden, 4 November 1904

  Paris, on the second day of Christmas 1908

  THE LETTER FROM THE YOUNG WORKER

  Notes

  Chronology

  Afterword

  Translator’s Note and Further Reading

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  Letters to a Young Poet

  Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the finest and most widely read poets of the twentieth century, was born in Prague in 1875. He published a great deal of verse early on, which is now little read, but with The Book of Images (1902), The Book of Hours (1905), and especially New Poems (1907 and 1908), he established himself as the major poet writing in German at the time. He married in 1901 and had a daughter, but abandoned family life almost immediately. In 1910 he published his only novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, which draws in part on his own experiences of Paris, where he went in 1902 to write a short and brilliant book on Rodin (Auguste Rodin, 1903). Despite travelling widely, Paris was the main geographical pole in Rilke’s life until the First World War, when he was stranded in Munich. From there, after the war, he moved to Switzerland, completing the Duino Elegies in 1922, which he had begun ten years before, and receiving the ‘dictation’ of the Sonnets to Orpheus. After this, while living in the French-speaking Valais, he wrote more in French than in German, and published Vergers suivi des Quatrains Valaisans a few months before his death from leukaemia at the end of 1926. After his death a lot of important uncollected poetry gradually emerged, as well as two further collections in French. The publication of his enormous correspondence, still not complete, began with the appearance of Letters to a Young Poet in 1929.

  Charlie Louth was born in Bristol in 1969. He is a Fellow of The Queen’s College, Oxford, where he lectures in German. His translations of Friedrich Hölderlin’s Essays and Letters (with Jeremy Adler) appeared in Penguin Classics in 2009.

  Lewis Hyde is a poet, essayist, translator and cultural critic with a particular interest in the public life of the imagination. His books include The Gift (1993), Trickster Makes This World (1998) and Common as Air (2010). The former director of undergraduate creative writing at Harvard University, Hyde teaches during the fall semester at Kenyon College, where he is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing. During the rest of the year he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

  Preface

  In late autumn 1902 it was – I was sitting under ancient chestnut trees in the gardens of the Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt with a book. I was so absorbed by my reading that I hardly noticed it when the only one of our teachers who was not an army officer, Horaček, the learned and good-natured chaplain of the Academy, came and joined me. He took the volume from my hand, looked at the cover and shook his head. ‘Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke?’ he asked thoughtfully. He leafed through its pages, ran his eyes over a few verses, looked reflectively into the distance and finally nodded. ‘So, our pupil René Rilke has become a poet.’

  And I was told about the slight, pale boy sent by his parents more than fifteen years before to the Military Lower School in Sankt Pölten so that he might later become an officer. In those days Horaček had worked there as the chaplain and he still remembered his former pupil well. He described him as a quiet, serious, highly gifted child, who liked to keep himself to himself, put up with the discipline of boarding-school life patiently and after the fourth year moved on with the others to the Military Upper School in Mährisch-Weisskirchen. There his constitution proved not to be resilient enough, and so his parents took him out of the establishment and had him continue his studies at home in Prague. What path his career had taken after that Horaček was unable to say.

  Given all this it is probably not difficult to understand that I decided that very hour to send my poetic efforts to Rainer Maria Rilke and ask him for his verdict. Not yet twenty years old and on the verge of going into a profession which I felt was directly opposed to my true inclinations, I thought that if anyone was going to understand my situation it was the author of the book To Celebrate Myself. And without its being my express intention, my verses were accompanied by a letter in which I revealed myself more unreservedly than to anyone ever before, or to anyone since.

  Many weeks went by before an answer came. The letter with its blue seal bore a Paris postmark, weighed heavy in the hand and displayed on the envelope the same clarity, beauty and assurance of hand with which the content itself was written from the first line to the last. And so my regular correspondence with Rainer Maria Rilke began, lasting until 1908 and then gradually petering out because life forced me into domains which the poet’s warm, tender and moving concern had precisely wanted to protect me from.

  But that is unimportant. The only important thing is the ten letters that follow, important for the insight they give into the world in which Rainer Maria Rilke lived and worked, and important too for many people engaged in growth and change, today and in the future. And where a great and unique person speaks, the rest of us should be silent.

  Franz Xaver Kappus

  Berlin, June 1929

  Introduction

  A GEOGRAPHY OF SOLITUDE

  Letters to a Young Poet could as easily have been called Letters from a Young Poet. Rainer Maria Rilke was only twenty-six years old when Franz Xaver Kappus first wrote to him in 1902. As the addresses on Rilke’s letters indicate, he had no settled home (first he’s in Paris, then on the Italian coast, then at an art colony in northern Germany, then in Rome, then in Sweden, then back in Paris). Three years before these letters start, he had married the sculptor Clara Westhoff and fathered a child, but he and his wife rarely lived together, nor did they raise their daughter (they left that task to Clara’s parents). Nonetheless, he was not without a sense of family obligation. ‘The last two years since my marriage I really have tried to earn, continually, day by day,’ he wrote to a friend in the same week as the second letter to Kappus, confessing that ‘not much has come of it’ and that it left him feeling ‘as if someone had closed the window towards the garden in which my songs live’.

  As for those songs, Rilke had clearly dedicated himself to poetry and had been publishing since the early 1890s, but he could not yet be sure that the work would give him sufficient foundation in the world. The letter just cited continues: ‘I have written eleven or twelve books and have received almost nothing for them …’ Some years earlier he had enrolled himself in a business school (an experiment that lasted only a few months), and he periodically dreamed that he might become a schoolteacher or a doctor or more simply ‘seek rescue in some quiet handicraft’.

  Nor was Rilke entirely free of his parents. Concurrent with the letters he sent to Kappus are letters sent to him by his father, letters in which Josef Rilke expressed concern that his son had failed to find a respectable career and offered to secure him a civil service job in Prague. Just before a visit to his parents in August of 1903, his father wrote to worry
about the way that Rilke dressed and to suggest that he order himself a new suit. In those days when Rilke fell to musing on his ideal poetic career he would find his reveries interrupted by the word ‘imprudent’ spoken in his father’s voice.

  As for Rilke’s mother, she visited him in Rome a month before the seventh letter to Kappus. ‘Every meeting with her is a kind of setback,’ he wrote to a friend.

  When I have to see this lost, unreal woman who is connected with nothing, who cannot grow old, I feel how even as a child I struggled to get away from her and fear deep within me lest after years and years of running and walking I am still not far enough from her, that somewhere inwardly I still make movements that are the other half of her embittered gestures … Then I have a horror of her distraught pieties … herself empty as a dress, ghostly and terrible. And that still I am her child; that some scarcely recognizable wallpaper door in this faded wall that doesn’t belong to anything was my entrance into the world …!

  The sympathetic intelligence described here, the kind that leads a man ‘inwardly’ to complete someone else’s gestures, is a part of Rilke’s poetic genius to be sure (how else could he have written the remarkable poem about the panther in the Paris zoo?). At the same time, this ability to identify with others sometimes led Rilke to lose his own bearings. In August 1902, about six months before these letters begin, Rilke had travelled to Paris to write a monograph on the sculptor Auguste Rodin. The trip was a turning point in his life: the older man offered a model of how an artist can ground himself in steady, patient work. Nonetheless, Rilke hated Paris. He felt invisible and alone, surrounded by men and women driven like machines, people ‘holding out under the foot of each day that trod on them, like tough beetles’. Their ‘burdened lives’, he told a friend, threatened to swamp him:

  I often had to say aloud to myself that I was not one of them … And yet, when I noticed how my clothes were becoming worse and heavier from week to week … I was frightened and felt that I would belong irretrievably to the lost if some passer-by merely looked at me and half unconsciously counted me with them.

  In great detail he described the morning when he came upon a man suffering from the nervous disease known as St Vitus’s Dance. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Rilke was possessed by what he saw:

  No one paid any attention to him; but I, who couldn’t keep my eyes off him even for a second, knew how gradually the restlessness was returning, how it became stronger and stronger … how it shook at his shoulders, how it clung to his head to tear it out of balance, and how suddenly it quite unexpectedly overcame and broke up his walk.

  Feeling ‘will-less’, Rilke followed the man whose fears, he felt, were ‘no longer distinguishable from mine’. Finally he broke away and returned to his rooms, ‘exhausted’, used up by someone else’s malady. He had been on his way to the library but the trip now seemed pointless; there couldn’t possibly be a book powerful enough to expel the thing that had taken hold of him.

  In sketching this background to the ‘young poet’ letters, I have been quoting from Rilke’s concurrent correspondence with more intimate acquaintances. In the Kappus letters, Rilke sometimes hints at his own difficulties (as when he says that his ‘life is full of troubles and sadness’) but, as might be expected, he never lays them out in any detail. The letters to friends are less reticent, however, and one of their surprises is how often Rilke speaks of being anxious and afraid. Afraid of what? Afraid, I think, that he might never become his own person. In the seventh letter to Kappus, Rilke mentions the way in which most people, faced with the difficulties of sexual love, ‘escape into one of the many conventions which like public shelters are set up … along this most dangerous of paths’. Clearly, Rilke himself did not wish to take shelter, but the temptation was obviously there – to settle down, to support his wife and child, to buy himself a good suit, to follow a path that no one could call imprudent. As with many young artists, Rilke had a sense of the land to which his gifts might lead him, but he was also anxious that he might never get there. He lived in fear of two false fates: either that he might end up as lost as the ragged poor who had surrounded him in Paris or else that he might succumb to the safe but numbing comforts of convention.

  It is in these terms that I understand one of the great themes laid out in the letters collected here, the idea that poetic practice requires solitude. In the vision Rilke offers, solitude is not merely a matter of being alone: it is a territory to be entered and occupied, and Rilke provides for Kappus (and the rest of us) a map of how to accomplish those ends. The first step is the simple recognition that solitude exists. A lack of connection to other people, after all, is not something we are normally eager to seek, acknowledge or welcome. Rilke himself hardly assented to the isolation he felt during his schooling in military academies (‘when I was a boy among boys, I was alone among them’), nor did he welcome it when he moved to Paris to write about Rodin (‘how alone I was this time among these people, how perpetually disowned by all I met’). In both cases, gloom and fear had overcome him. In Paris, before going to bed at night he used to read the Book of Job for solace: ‘It was all true of me, word for word!’

  Compare that touch of self-pity with the advice to Kappus: ‘We are solitary. It is possible to deceive yourself and act as if it were not the case … How much better … to take it as our starting-point.’ I don’t at all mean to imply by this juxtaposition that Rilke is being hypocritical. I mean, instead, to point to the spiritual intelligence that led him to convert solitude from a curse into a blessing. Rather than continue to suffer under his sense of aloneness, Rilke eventually did what he urges Kappus to do: he turned and embraced it. He took isolation to be a given, then entered and inhabited it.

  This trick of reversal, of turning negatives into positives, became a regular part of Rilke’s working method. Anxiety, fear, sadness, doubt: there is no human emotion that cannot be upended and put into service. Anxiety, he tells Kappus, should be thought of as ‘existential anxiety’, the kind that God requires of us in order to begin. The desire to flee from solitude can be converted into ‘a kind of tool’ to make solitude still larger. When doubts arise, simply ‘school them’: ‘instead of being demolishers they will be among your best workers’.

  To enter willingly the land of solitude does not, of course, mean that what follows will be easy. In my own experience, embracing solitude brings on another order of difficulties. When I was young and beginning to write, I used to put myself through periods of ritual retreat. I would cut off the telephone and the mail, unplug the television and the radio, take a short-term vow of silence, pull down the window shades and settle in to work for three or four days. Often on the first day, much to my chagrin, I would fall into a depression. The whole exercise suddenly seemed pointless; I had my pen in my hand but nothing to say.

  Something similar used to happen to Rilke. To take a key example, Rilke was living more or less alone in a medieval castle on the Adriatic coast near Trieste when, in the winter of 1911−12, he began to write the Duino Elegies. As the owner of the estate, Marie Taxis, reported, the retreat started badly: ‘A great sadness befell him, and he began to suspect that this winter would … fail to produce anything.’ As Rilke himself told his patron: ‘Things must first get bad, worse, worst, beyond what any language can hold. I creep about all day in the thickets of my life, screaming like a wild man and clapping my hands. You would not believe what hair-raising creatures this flushes up.’

  It is worth pausing over the mention of ‘sadness’, both because ‘great sadnesses’ figure in the letters to Kappus and because they belong to the geography of solitude. Solitude was for Rilke the necessary enclosure within which he could begin to form an independent identity, a sense of himself free from the callings of family and convention. Solitude is the alembic of personhood, as the alchemists might have said. And yet its entrances seem to be guarded by feelings that would make most people turn and walk the other way – not just sadness, but anxiety, fear,
doubt, premonitions of death, ‘all unsettling, all pain, all depression of spirit …’

  Rilke’s simple suggestion is that the discipline of art demands a turning towards, rather than away from, such states of mind. They portend necessary labours and must thus be taken seriously. He asks Kappus to imagine that sadness indicates a moment ‘when something new enters into us’ and that we then have duties towards the unfamiliar thing. It may in fact be fate itself, a destiny which, with proper attention, we can absorb and make our own. ‘We have no reason to be mistrustful of our world … If it holds terrors they are our terrors’ and we should try to love them. They are like the dragons in old myth that, when approached directly, turn out not to be dragons at all but helpless royalty in need of our attentions.

  Whatever the exact metaphysics of such encounters, the point is that an exploration of the land of solitude cannot begin until we have accepted solitude as a fact (‘We are alone!’) and then faced the minatory moods that stand just inside its gates. And what happens after that? If acceptance comes and sadness is endured, what follows?

  What follows is a change of consciousness in regard particularly to time. The very first of Rilke’s letters to Kappus distinguishes between life’s ‘most inconsequential and slightest hour’ and the clearly more desirable ‘quietest hour’ of the night. This latter is not, I think, an hour at all. It has no knowable dimension. ‘All distances, all measurements, alter for the one who becomes solitary’, especially the measurement of time: ‘a year has no meaning, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree …’ Creative life contains its own temporality and the surest way to make it fail is to put it on an external clock. Mechanical time makes haste, as it were, but haste dissolves in solitude. In solitude we feel ‘as if eternity lay before’ us.