Letters to a Young Poet

While a student, Franz Kappus began sending his poetry to a young Rainer Maria Rilke, seeking his advice. The resultant ten letters from Rilke, published after his death, contain words of luminous intimacy where Rilke shapes the ecstasy of youthful desire into a consideration of how to live life deliberately. Becoming an artist is an apprenticeship in solitude, seeking, and suffering. When initially asked by Herr Kappus whether his verses are good, Rilke counters with the dismissal of all such outward concerns, and an admonition to go inside oneself, to discover whether one''s poetic motives reach to the hidden recesses of the heart. For the artist is on his own, alone, centered in his innermost depths. Rilke next speaks of surrounding oneself with books, in which one may enter worlds of inconceivable greatness. In a subsequent letter he writes of the artist''s vocation as one of growing into the spirit of childhood, where everything that happens is forever a beginning. And