Letters to a Young Poet

Letters to a Young Poet
by Rainer Maria Rilke

Letters to a Young Poet
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Book Summary Information

Author: Rainer Maria Rilke
Edition: Paperback
Published: 2002-05-08
ISBN: 0486422453
Number of pages: 80
Publisher: Dover Publications

Book Reviews of Letters to a Young Poet

Book Review: Great condition, lame translation
Summary: 4 Stars

I ordered 11 copies of Letters to a Young Poet for my graduating seniors in my Advanced Art class. The price was good, they arrived in a timely manner, and in fabulous condition. No complaints there! I didn't take into consideration, however, that different translations can alter your experience of a work of literature so very much! I did not like this translation as much as the one I am more familiar with (from Shambala press) and was a bit disappointed with this version.

Summary of Letters to a Young Poet

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
In 1903, Rilke replied in a series of 10 letters to a student who had submitted some verses to the well-known Austrian poet for an assessment. Written during an important stage in Rilke's artistic development, these letters contain many of the themes that later appeared in his best works. Essential reading for scholars, poetry lovers.

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