Letters to a Young Poet

Rainer Maria Rilke

I should preface my judgment on this by saying that I've been misled for the past twenty years regarding this book, which I somehow never got around to reading until I was older than both of the principals therein (the young poet hasn't yet reached his twenties at the beginning of the correspondence; Rilke is twenty-eight). Norton's categorization of it as literature (instead of philosophy), and various rave reviews of it that concentrate on the fact that Rilke wrote these letters to a person who wrote him looking for help with his (the original writer's) poetry, led me to believe this small collection of essays had to do with poesy. No, they have to do with philosophy. Rilke informs his reader that he (Rilke) is unqualified to remark on craft and technique on the very first page, and does not do so for the rest of the book. So, in other words, I didn't get what I was expecting.

The philosophy therein seems pretty dated forty years after that fact (and almost a century since the letters were actually written), but we didn't have an avalanche of self-help books in 1962, many of which were probably derived at least in part from Rilke's words, feeding us this endless stream of unbearable pap. The book can be summed up neatly in the words of a particularly memorable Monty Python song (I'm sure I don't have to mention which), but that's not something to hold against the book. Rilke was a thinker of the illigitimi non carborundum school of thought; while his prose does get a tad wordy in a few places, he generally sticks to the point, and his words are far more intelligent than those of what has come since.

The Norton edition of 1962 also contains a mini-bio of Rilke centered around the time the letters were written, to give the reader background on the events in Rilke's life that were influencing his words. Nice addition that helps deepen the understanding of what he was on about.

I just wish he'd been on about poetry.