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 ...
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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 he writes of moments of sorrow as a new thing entering us; and, unnoticed, becoming a part of our very life-blood. For Rilke, art is a way of living: becoming a poet or an artist is not so much about learning one's craft as about becoming a certain kind of person. Act is preceded by being, so that an unrestrained devotion to the creative process must proceed from the nurturing of patience and a deepening of one's interior life. An immense inner stillness, reaching through time, rightly precedes all efforts of artistic creation. Developing as an artist is not measured by time or any external markers: "Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree, which does not force its sap, and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them will come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them...." This is a book to encounter in youth and remain with into old age, a vade mecum in the school of artistic being and thoughtful living.
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Add this copy of Letters to a Young Poet to cart. $17.78, new condition, Sold by Ria Christie Books rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Uxbridge, MIDDLESEX, UNITED KINGDOM, published 2014 by Greenpoint Books, LLC.
This book is really inspirational! As an artist, it really helped me see things in myself I never knew were there, and to connect more with my subconcious. If you enjoy this book, also engage yourself in another quick, but wonderful read, "Letters to a Young Artist." It's more current, and set up in the same fashion, just speaks to a the visual crowd.
GailChiarello
Aug 16, 2007
Robert Duncan Praised This Book
Robert Duncan, the San Francisco poet, praised Rilke to the skies in his graduate seminar Advanced Poetry workshop (English 204) at San Francisco State in the spring of 1965. Following Robert's lead, this book became my daily companion the entire spring. I was working in the UC Berkeley library and would sneak off into a cubicle in the stacks during breaks and lunch hours to devour Letters to a Young Poet. Highly recommended for young (and older!) writers.
simitatores
Jul 26, 2007
Solace in solitude
This book pulled me through during my spells of depression. Rilke speaks with utmost warmth and sincerity that is so much akin to a friend. Here are some excerpts from the book.
"Things aren't so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered"
"You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."
