Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

Paris, February 17, 1903




Dear Sir,



Your letter reached me only a few days ago. I want to thank you for his great and dear confidence. Little more than I can. I can not enter and spread on the nature of your ways and that each critical intention is too remote from me. Nothing can touch as little as a work of art critical discourse: that way you get more and more or less happy misunderstandings. Things you can not grasp or say as all we would usually have us believe, most events are inexpressible, take place in a space that word has never crossed, and the most unspeakable of all are the works of art, mysterious existences, whose life, next to our fading, endures.



Given this point, I can only say again that your verses have their own style, but covered and subdued start to a personal focus. Lighter than elsewhere feel the last poem my soul. There something you really want to reach an expression. And the beautiful poem To Leopardi grows perhaps a sort of kinship with that great patience. However, your poems are not things in themselves, independent, or even the last one to Leopardi. Your gracious letter that accompanied them, never fails to clarify something wrong, I've heard reading your verses, but not be able to designate by name.



You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have given to other first-morrow. Sent them to magazines. Compares them with other poems ev'inquietate whether certain editors reject your efforts. Now (since you had made me permission to recommend) please leave all this. You look out to the outside and above this you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help no one. There is only one way. Soak in yourself. Search for the reason that calls you to write; If being examined extends its roots in the deepest place of your heart, if you would be forced to confess to die when you were denied writing. This above all: ask yourself the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this were to play consensus, if there be granted to address this serious question with a strong and simple 'I must, then built your life according to this necessity. Your life even into its most indifferent and slightest sign and must now be witness to this impulse. Then av-vicinatevi nature. Try as the first man in the world to say what you see and live and love and lose. Do not write love poems, avoid beginning too common and customary forms: they are the most difficult, and requires a great power couple already own to create something where you have good traditions in large numbers, even in the splendid . So save yourself from those general reasons that your everyday life offers you; shown your sorrows, and longings, thoughts passengers and faith in some beauty, all depicted with this intimate, quiet, humble sincerity and use to express the things around you, pictures of your dreams and the objects of your memory. If your daily life seems poor, not the accused, indicted for yourself, you're not quite evoke the poet wealth creator because there is a poverty or poor, indifferent place. And if you were in a prison, whose walls are not leaking any of the noises of the world up to your senses - you would not still always be your baby, this precious wealth, royal, this treasure of memories? Aim in that part of your atten-tion. Try to raise the submerged sensations of that vast past, your personality will continue, your loneliness s'amplierà and become a house wrapped in a light of dusk, which goes far beyond the noise of others. While on this journey within, by immersion into their world come towards, then you will not think to question whether any good verses or attempt to interest the magazines in these works: for in them you will see your dear natural possession , and a voice part of your life. A work of art is good, He's born of necessity. In this way, its origin lies its opinion: there is no other. So, sir, I do not know give other advice than this: to penetrate the depths of yourself and try that jumps your life to its source you will find the answer to whether we need to create. Welcome it as it sounds, without getting lost in interpretation. Perhaps it will prove that you are called art. Then I will inform this chance and take it with his weight and his greatness, without ever asking for compensation, which might be outside. That the Creator must 'be a world for themselves and find everything in himself and in nature, which He's ally.

But maybe after this descent into yourself and in your solitude you renounce becoming a poet (just like I said, I feel that we could live without writing, not to have more than the right). But even then this dive, which I pray you, has not been in vain. Your life will begin to find their way without a doubt, and who want to be good, vast and rich, this I hope this more than I can say.
I must say that there still? To me everything seems accentuated according to his merit, and in the end I still recommend only support the development of calm and serious, you can not disturb more violently that if you look outside and wait outside to answer questions, which perhaps can only answer your piùintimo feeling in your now more subdued.

It was a joy for me to find in your letter the name of Professor Horacek; I have for this lovely learned a great respect and gratitude vibrant over the years. Please, please, tell him of my feeling, is great kindness he will remember me, and I can appreciate.
I refer you to all the verses that had made me want to trust friendly. And thank you again for the greatness of your trust and cordiality, which I tried to make me a bit 'more worthy than I, as a stranger, not really, with this honest answer, because in my best conscience.
With each devotion and sympathy

Rainer Maria Rilke
 

[Adelphi, 2006 (sedicesima edizione). Originale Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Mein, 1929.]