Find out the reason that commands you to write see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. In the first letter, rather than offer any critique of Kappus’ poetry, Rilke immediately encourages his young correspondent to abandon all need for outside validation of his work and, instead, to look unto his own self for guidance: Photograph: Wikimedia Commons Look to your own self for guidance Paula Modersohn-Becker, Rainer Maria Rilke.
Three years after Rilke’s death, Kappus assembled and published the letters entitled, Letters to a Young Poet ( Briefe an einen jungen Dichter) in 1929. Drawing on the contemporaneous theories of Sigmund Freud, his work often focuses on an individual’s yearning for communion with the innermost self, written at a time when mankind was plagued with nihilistic and chaotic interpretations of the world.Īnd thus, his correspondence with Kappus, one that would last between 1902 and 1908, would crystallize Rilke’s aesthetic and philosophical sensibilities over the course of ten letters, with advice ranging from loneliness, sexuality, Nature and the need to trust one’s own inner judgement. Rilke (4th December 1875–29th December 1926) was one of the most significant poets in the German language. He decided to send them to an alumnus of the academy, the Austrian poet, Rainer Maria Rilke. “When a truly great and unique spirit speaks,ĪT THE TURN of the last century, a 19-year-old student at the Military Academy of Vienna, named Franz Xaver Kappus, wanted career advice on his impending secondment to the armed forces, as well as a literary critique on a handful of poems he had recently composed. To write is to live, and to live is to write
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