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Letters to a Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke
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Letters to a Young Poet Summary and Study Guide
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SUMMARY: “LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET”
Letters to a Young Poet is a collection of 10 letters written by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke to Franz Xaver Kappus, from February 1903 to December 1908. In an introduction to the book, Kappus describes how he came to begin his correspondence with Rilke. At the time, Kappus was a 19-year-old student at an Austrian military school. Though Kappus was set to become a military officer, he held aspirations of instead becoming a poet. After discovering that Rilke, then 27-years-old and already renowned as a poet, had also attended the military school, Kappus began a correspondence with Rilke that lasted several years. Kappus kept the 10 letters and published the collection in 1929, several years after Rilke’s death, as he felt the letters gave insight into Rilke’s worldview. This guide follows the Norton paperback edition, published in 2004.
In Kappus’s initial letter to Rilke, he sent Rilke examples of his own poetry, hoping that Rilke would provide feedback on the poems and advise Kappus on whether he should pursue a career as a poet. Rilke’s response begins that “critical intention is too far from me,” and that he feels that critical discussion of poetry is ultimately impossible (15). In Rilke’s view, the experience of artistic works such as poems is ultimately ineffable, as they are “mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures” (15). While still offering Kappus some initial judgments on his poetry, Rilke advises Kappus to stop seeking outside affirmation of his poetry, instead looking inward and asking himself whether he feels an intense urge to write. Rilke closes the letter by suggesting that Kappus focus on exploring his everyday life and experiences, especially his childhood, as material for his poetry, and that he will know whether he is meant to be a poet after doing “this descent into yourself and into your inner solitude” (17).
In the second letter, Rilke offers Kappus some more advice for his development as a poet. Rilke tells Kappus that while irony can sometimes be a powerful poetic tool, he should not allow himself to “be governed by it” (19). Instead, Rilke advises Kappus that he should “seek the depth of things” and only use irony if it authentically comes out of his inner soul (20). The third letter finds Rilke continuing his prior assertion that any critical discussion of poetry is ultimately meaningless, and he advises Kappus not to consult any literary criticism. Instead, Rilke notes that “works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism” (23). A young poet therefore must turn completely inward to achieve their artistic development, “let[ting] each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself” (23). Poets cannot rush their artistic development, but instead must patiently allow their inner being to slowly develop until it achieves “a new clarity,” allowing the poet to create great works of art (24).
Rilke’s letters to Kappus begin to shift focus in his fourth letter: While still advising Kappus on his poetic development, Rilke also begins to advise Kappus on larger questions Kappus has about life in general. Rather than offering answers to Kappus’s questions, Rilke tells Kappus to instead embrace the fact that he is young and only at the beginning of his development: “[T]ry to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue” (27). According to Rilke, the result will be that Kappus will authentically grow into his personality and attitude toward life out of his own desires and convictions, rather than being “influenced by convention and custom” (27). Rilke also discusses love and sex, arguing that “physical pleasure” is as important to artistic creation as any other experience (29). Responding to Kappus’s seeming anxiety over not having experienced love, Rilke tells Kappus to embrace his solitude now, as well as his relationships with family and his elders, in preparation for a future love “that is being stored up for you like an inheritance” (30).