Letters to a Young Poet

Rating:
Summary: Poor translation of an even poorer book
Review: I've never understood the fascination with the "wisdom" of the 28 year old Rilke. To me, this is quite possibly the most condescending work in German literature.

Rating:
Summary: Read it and Reread it
Review: If you have ever wanted to create /anything/, not just poetry (this book is not about writing poetry!), and have been faced with the overwhelming fear of failure: read this book

If you ever are feeling alone, dejected, unsure of life: read this book.

It contains one of the most beautiful and honest perspecitives on life that I have found in any book. Following Rilke's advice, though, may be impossible for you, but--here's to trying.

Rating:
Summary: more questions than answers
Review: In theory, I think this book is wonderful. It's the timeless story of a wise and worldly teacher sharing his wisdom with a young and innocent and admiring student, telling him to look within, to avoid love for now and seek solitude and personal reflection instead, to first study life in its tiniest and least significant forms in order to discover true beauty, etc.

My shock with this book came AFTER reading it, when I discovered that Rilke HIMSELF was only 27 or 28 years old (!) when he started writing to the young poet. For me, his age did not jive with his tone, which was that of a 85 year old 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 love, not attempting love poems, not being able to understand love for some time yet - all wonderful and perhaps true 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 ahead of his time, and perhaps one who knew too much about himself and human nature to ever really find true 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 wrong!

In the meantime, I must learn more about the life of Rilke, otherwise this book shall lack a context for me...

Rating:
Summary: A must read if you want to be a writer
Review: Letters to a Young Poet has become a classic since it first appeared back in the 1930's. Most everyone knows what the book is and is about, so I won't bore you with lengthy explanations of such. Simply put - it is a collection of letters from Rilke to a poet that wrote asking Rilke to look at his poems and tell the youth what he thought of them.

Every writer should read the first letter in the book. Every writer. It contains the most poignant statement he makes in all ten letters by far:

"This above all - ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple 'I must,' then build your life according to this necessity..."

This advice, given to one writer a century ago, is still one of the truest wisdoms all writers must adhere to.

The other nine letters offer some other pearls of wisdom concerning writing and life - also a glimpse into the man that Rilke was. But they do not match the power and depth of that first letter, which I read and re-read every week. Committing it to memory.

Must I write? I must.

Rating:
Summary: I guess everyone realized this but me...
Review: Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (Norton, 1962)

I should preface my judgment on this by saying 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 (instead 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 believe this small 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 other words, I didn't get what I was expecting.

The philosophy therein seems pretty dated forty years after that fact (and almost a century since the letters were actually 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 those 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. ***

Rating:
Summary: Graceful and honest
Review: Rilke's letters to a young poet are deeply moving in their honesty and clarity. Responding to the corrospondence of a student of one of Rilke's former teachers, Rilke not only explains what it is to be a poet ("ask yourself in the most silent hour of the night: MUST I write? ... if you meet this solmn question with a strong, simple "I must," then build your life in accordance with this necessity;") but what it is to exist and experience life in the modern world. ("Don't search for answers now, because you would not be able to live them .. the point is, to live everything. LIVE the questions now.")

The power of Rilke's words are in their truth, but also in the beauty of their sentiments. This is one of my favorite books of all time for this reason, and I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: timeless wisdom
Review: Ten letters Rilke wrote to an aspiring poet asking
for his help with becoming a poet.
Surprisingly for the reader and probably as well for
the recipient of said letters, Rilke doesn't go into
the poetry aspect at all, but clearly refuses to do
so right in the first letter.
Instead he treats the questions of what it means to
work on becoming a fully developped human being.
Giving timeless advice full of wisdom about solitude,
troubles, sorrows, love, human interaction and being
part of a society in which one doesn't seem to really fit
in.

Wonderful advice, very often in the form of further questions
that Rilke seemed to have sent back in order to encourage
the recipient to go further in his quest of finding what
everything means (to him) and who one is.

Wonderfully poetic advise to be shared and read and reread

Rating:
Summary: a study of mentors
Review: The concept of the mentor is fraught these days with the idea of the eager young business school graduate looking to position himself in the light of a beneficent elder who can guide our eager young MBA through the thickets of corporate culture.

What, pray tell, does this have to do with the contents of a book by Rilke, you rightly ask yourself. Consider the concept of a mentor: the person who is supposed to guide you, to whom you turn for answers to questions you realize your family is too biased to provide, upon whose experience you rely. Rilke, in this book descibes his aesthetic sense, that is, how the poet is to relate to the world, to make sense of the world about which he writes.

It is a beautifully elegant and simple theme. Those seeking mentors would do well to carry this book around and heed its lesson that the mentor you choose should not be the person with the most accolades but the person with the most empathy for you.

Rating:
Summary: A timeless masterpiece
Review: The letters to a young poet are a piece of advise for everybody who is dissatisfied with his life or who maybe just wants to widen its horizon. It is a book that you should read in a period of your life, where you are able to have time for solitude. This book is the embodiement of impressionistic ideas. It is a very personal book and therefore I do not feel able to give a general recommendation and I would also not say that it is a book full of great wisdoms( there are very few of those) but it is a book that shows possible ways of reaching a deeper feeling of life. And it is a book which is full of the wonderfully chosen words of this great great poet: Rainer Maria Rilke

Rating:
Summary: Deep and beautiful poetic letters
Review: The ten letters Rilke wrote to the young poet seeking his guidance and help are deep and moving documents. Rilke truly considers his young correspondent, his verses, and tries to genuinely help him. But what he does in the course of doing so is reveal his own poetic credo and mission. And this poetic mission involves a deepening inward, a dedication to the creative process which is total, and a vision of life as enfolding creation organically. Rilke expresses his loneliness and special understanding of life in these letters. He does this in a language which is a kind of poetic prose in his own unique voice.

Some advice:

"Consider yourself and your feeling right every time with regard to every such argumentation, discussion or introduction; if you are wrong after all, the natural growth of your own inner life will lead you slowly and with time to other insights. Leave to your opinions their own undisturbed development, which like all progress, must come from deep within, and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything. Everything is a gestation and a bringing forth."

"I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything!"

"Being an artist means not reckoning and counting but ripening like the tree.."

"There is but one solitude, and that is great, and not easy to bear, and to almost everybody must come hours when they would gladly exchange it for any sort of intercourse, however banal and cheap.."

On Rodin "To stick to my work and have every confidence in it , this I am learning from his great and given example."