Letter One
Dear Sir,
Your letter arrived just a few days ago. I want to thank you
for the great confidence you have placed in me. That is all I can do. I cannot
discuss your verses; for any attempt at criticism would be foreign to me.
Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always
result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so
tangible and sayable as people would usually have us
believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen
in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable
than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life
endures beside our own small, transitory life.
With this note as a preface, may I just tell you that your
verses have no style of their own, although they do have silent and hidden
beginnings of something personal. I feel this most
clearly in the last poem, "My Soul." There, something of your own is
trying to become word and melody. And in the lovely poem "To Leopardi" a kind of kinship with that great, solitary
figure does perhaps appear. Nevertheless, the poems are not yet anything in
themselves, not yet anything independent, even the last one and the one to Leopardi. Your kind letter, which accompanied them, managed
to make clear to me various faults that I felt in reading your verses, though I
am not able to name them specifically.
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 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 heart; 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 your 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 while 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. Don't write love poems;
avoid those forms that are too facile and ordinary: they are the hardest to
work with, and it takes great, fully ripened power to create something
individual where good, even glorious, traditions exist in abundance. So rescue
yourself from these general themes and 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 not poverty and no poor, indifferent place.
And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the
world's sounds - wouldn't you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all
price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your
personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place
where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by,
far in the distance. - 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. Nor will you try to inte4rest magazines in these works:
for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a
voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is
the only way one can judge it. So, dear Sir, I can't give you any advice but
this: to go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life
flows; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must
create. Accept that answer, just as it is given to you, without trying to
interpret it. Perhaps you will discover that you are called to be an artist.
Then take the destiny upon yourself, and bear it, its burden and its greatness,
without ever asking what reward might come from outside. For the creator must
be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to
whom his whole life is devoted.
But after this descent into yourself and into your solitude,
perhaps you will have to renounce becoming a poet (if, as I have said, one
feels one could live without writing, then one shouldn't write at all).
Nevertheless, even then, this self-searching that I as of you will not have
been for nothing. Your life will still find its own paths from there, and that
they may be good, rich, and wide is what I wish for you, more than I can say
What else can I tell you? It seems to me that everything has
its proper emphasis; and finally I want to add just one more bit of advice: to
keep growing, silently and earnestly, through your while development; you
couldn't disturb it any more violently than by looking outside and waiting for
outside answers to question that only your innermost feeling, in your quietest
hour, can perhaps answer.
It was a pleasure for me to find in your letter the name of
Professor Horacek; I have great reverence for that
kind, learned man, and a gratitude that has lasted through the years. Will you
please tell him how I feel; it is very good of him to still think of me, and I
appreciate it.
The poems that you entrusted me with I
am sending back to you. And I thank you once more for your questions and sincere
trust, of which, by answering as honestly as I can, I have tried to make myself
a little worthier than I, as a stranger, really am.
Yours very truly,
Rainer Maria Rilke