Letters to a young poet

First published in 1929, three years after the death of Rilke, this is a book I have been meaning to read for many years, and it is indeed a classic on art, solitude, sexuality, reciprocity and the experience of understanding life. The young poet to whom these ten letters are addressed was a 19-year-old cadet in the year of the first, 1903. Rilke encourages Franz Kappus to go within, to love his solitude, to trust the ripening creative process, to protect his inner life and his capacity for subtle perception. Famously, he should 'have patience with all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves, like closed rooms, like the books written in a foreign language.' He reminds the reader that everything has to be lived, including the questions, and in this way we can gradually live into the answers. The next sentence is rarely quoted, but important in my view: 'perhaps you bear within yourself the capacity to imagine and shape of sacred way of life.' (p. 34) The essential arises from the depths within in what Jung would call individuation. Rilke also has beautiful thoughts about learning to love, which he says is not about merging: 'it is a noble calling for the individual to ripen, to differentiate, to become a world in oneself in response to another…..the love that consists of two solitudes that protect, border, and greet each other. (p. 56, 60)