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Every so often, when I am frustrated with my craft or melancholy or simply in need of encouragement, I turn to Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. Given my post of yesterday, I felt it particularly pertinent to reflect on Rilke's advice on what it means to be a writer, and his feeling that solitude is a vital part of the writing life.
Letters to a Young Poet was one of the required books in my first creative writing class, and I think that it is still one of the best books on writing that I have read, even if I may seek out a different style of the writing life than Rilke embraced. His writing is utterly spiritual, and his understanding of the divine quite nontraditional, which becomes more clear in The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God. If you haven't read much Rilke, I highly recommend him overall--and the Letters excerpted here in particular.
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You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise you or help you--no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heard; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of the night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must," then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose. ... Write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty--describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place. ... And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. ... A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.
Letters to a Young Poet was one of the required books in my first creative writing class, and I think that it is still one of the best books on writing that I have read, even if I may seek out a different style of the writing life than Rilke embraced. His writing is utterly spiritual, and his understanding of the divine quite nontraditional, which becomes more clear in The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God. If you haven't read much Rilke, I highly recommend him overall--and the Letters excerpted here in particular.
--
You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise you or help you--no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heard; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of the night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must," then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose. ... Write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty--describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place. ... And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. ... A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.
