Letters to a Young Poet
by
Rainer Maria Rilke,M.D. Herter Norton*
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Amazon Description:
It would take a deeply cynical heart not to fall in love with Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. At the end of this millennium, his slender book holds everything a student of the century could want: the unedited thoughts of (arguably) the most important European poet of the modern age. Rilke wrote these 10 sweepingly emotional letters in 1903, addressing a former student of one of his own teachers. The recipient was wise enough to omit his own inquiries from the finished product, which means that we get a marvelously undiluted dose of Rilkean aesthetics and exhortation. The poet prefaced each letter with an evocative notation of the city in which he wrote, including Paris, Rome, and the outskirts of Pisa. Yet he spends most of the time encouraging the student in his own work, delivering a sublime, one-on-one equivalent of the modern writing workshop:
Go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from outside.Every page is stamped with Rilke's characteristic grace, and the book is free of the breathless effect that occasionally mars his poetry. His ideas on gender and the role of the artist are also surprisingly prescient. And even his retrograde comment on the "beauty of the virgin" (which the poet derives from the fact that she "has not yet achieved anything") is counterbalanced by his perception that "the sexes are more related than we think." Those looking for an alluring image of the solitary artist--and for an astonishing quotient of wisdom--will find both in Letters to a Young Poet. --Jennifer Buckendorff
Added on: Tuesday, August 15 2006
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Recent Quotes:
Source: Letters to a Young Poet, Page: 62..63
Contributed by: Beth.
…It is clear that we must embrace struggle. Every living thing
conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its
own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost,
against all resistance. We can be sure of very little, but the
need to court struggle is a surety that will not leave us. It is
good to be lonely, for being alone is not easy. The fact that
something is difficult must be one more reason to do it. To love
is also good, for love is difficult. For one human being to love
another is perhaps the most difficult task of all, the epitome, the
ultimate test. It is that striving for which all other striving
is merely preparation. For that reason young people – who are
beginners in everything – cannot yet love; they do not know how to
love. They must learn it.