Think, dear friend, reflect on the world that you carry within yourself. On the World Within (from The Sixth Letter, 52-53) Discipline yourself to attain it, but accept that which comes to you with deep trust, and as long as it comes from your own will, from your own inner need, accept it, and do not hate anything.Ĥ. Perhaps you are indeed carrying within yourself the potential to visualize, to design, and to create for yourself an utterly satisfying, joyful, and pure lifestyle. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day. At present you need to live the question. It is a question of experiencing everything. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.

On Loving and Living the Questions (from The Fourth Letter, 35) To allow the completion of every impression, every germ of a feeling deep within, in darkness, beyond words, in the realm of instinct unattainable by logic, to await humbly and patiently the hour of the descent of a new clarity: that alone is to live one’s art, in the realm of understanding as in that of creativity.ģ. On Living One’s Art (from the Third Letter, 26)Īll things consist of carrying to term and then giving birth.

At its source you will find the answer to the question….Ģ. Therefore, my dear friend, I know of no other advice than this: Go within and scale the depths of your being from which your very life springs forth. You’re looking outward and, above all else, that you must not do now.

Well now, since you have given me permission to advise you, I suggest that you give all that up. You send them to publishers you compare them with other poems you are disturbed when certain publishers reject your attempts. On Looking Inward (from The First Letter, 10, 12) (The subtitles are my own and the numbers refer to the pages in the hyperlinked book.)ġ. Rilke’s words touch the human soul and invite change. Despite the title, Rilke’s words are not limited to the young or would-be poets. Rilke’s letters were published posthumously as Letters to a Young Poet. Rilke offered wisdom rather than answers, a way rather than a destination. Kappus began the correspondence seeking Rilke’s judgment and critique of his poetry. Over a period of about six years Kappus and Rilke exchanged letters. “When a truly great and unique spirit speaks, the lesser ones must be silent,” Franz Xaver Kappus wrote about Rainer Marie Rilke.

Rilke letter 8