This above all-ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. Search for the reason that bids you write find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Now (since you have allowed me to advise you) I beg you to give up all that. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. At the cost of brevity, I must seek the apologies of my readers as I am compelled to reproduce the entire passage constituting Rilke’s suggestion. When Kappus dispatches a verse seeking Rilke’s opinion regarding the quality of the output, he receives an astonishing piece of wisdom that exhorts him to look within rather than seeking external approbation and accolade. Abhorring austerity and flinging aside all notions of authority, Rilke writes with the plain and pure intention of – writing.
Rilke’s method of telling Kappus “please do not bother writing to me repeatedly” seems to lie in dashing off an eight page masterpiece perusing which the reader would be moved to respond, unless his heart was to be constructed out of a carefully selected, indestructible chunk of anthracite.įrom channeling the foreboding murkiness of loneliness into veritable opportunities to introspecting the real reason behind putting pen to paper to deciphering the beautiful nuances of sex, Rilke holds forth with a great degree of purpose.
Condescending and caring in equal parts, they are at once forthcoming, yet forbidding. Yet the letters reveal in a glorious manner the intellectual depth of a twenty eight year old destined for greatness.
Trying to find his own footing as a writer, while at the same time battling a prolonged bout of ill health, Rilke was gallivanting between France and Italy in trying to either beat the harsh winters or attempting to evade intemperate summers. Rilke at the time of corresponding with Kappus was nowhere near his apogee. Over a span of a decade and a bit, ten letters were received by Kappus from an otherwise compulsive letter writing Rilke. Franz Xaver Kappus, a budding cadet officer instigated a sporadic string of correspondence with the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, that lasted six years.
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