Letters to a Young Poet

Are these any good? It is the question every beginner aches to have answered, and it is the one Rilke refuses, across all ten letters, ever to touch. Franz Kappus was nineteen, a military cadet who had mailed his verses to a poet barely older than himself, and what came back was not a verdict but a redirection. Go into yourself, Rilke tells him; find the hour of deepest quiet, the place where the need to write lives, and ask whether you would die if it were forbidden you. If the answer is no, then do not write. From there the letters keep widening, through solitude and doubt and the long work of love, toward the strange counsel at the book's heart: that a young man should be patient with everything unresolved inside him and learn to love the questions themselves rather than force them shut. Read them young and they quietly reset what you thought a life in art would cost. Few books have ever trusted a stranger so completely with his own becoming.