Letters to a Young Poet
by Rainer Maria Rilke (1929)
2023 reads, 11.5/12 (Interlude):
I just got to “Part 4: The Counterforce” in Gravity's Rainbow, which I heard is heavily influenced by the works of Rainer Maria Rilke, an early 20th-century German poet. Before continuing on, I figured I’d pause for a brief interlude and catch up a bit on his work (having read The Duino Elegies last year).
This is a collection of letters that Rilke sent to Franz Xaver Kappus, a student at a military academy who sent Rilke his own poems, asking for advice. They correspond over the course of six years, and this published collection contains Rilke’s ten letters to Kappus. These letters touch upon many of the themes in Rilke's work: most notably art, solitude, the difficulty of aligning with a religion. They alternate between down-to-earth passages (I laughed at “today writing is not going to be easy because I have had to write a good number of letters already and my hand is tired” – you didn’t have to write this sentence?) and highly profound statements – highly recommended for anyone wanting to get more into writing or poetry.
“We have already had to adjust our understanding of so many theories of planetary motion, and so too we shall gradually learn to recognize that what we call fate originates in ourselves, in humankind, and does not work on us from the outside.”