An immense inner stillness, reaching through time, rightly precedes all efforts of artistic creation. Act is preceded by being, so that an unrestrained devotion to the creative process must proceed from the nurturing of patience and a deepening of one’s interior life. For Rilke, art is a way of living: becoming a poet or an artist is not so much about learning one’s craft as about becoming a certain kind of person. And he writes of moments of sorrow as a new thing entering us and, unnoticed, becoming a part of our very life-blood. In a subsequent letter he writes of the artist’s vocation as one of growing into the spirit of childhood, where everything that happens is forever a beginning. Rilke next speaks of surrounding oneself with books, in which one may enter worlds of inconceivable greatness. For the artist is on his own, alone, centered in his innermost depths. When initially asked by Herr Kappus whether his verses are good, Rilke counters with the dismissal of all such outward concerns, and an admonition to go inside oneself, to discover whether one’s poetic motives reach to the hidden recesses of the heart. Becoming an artist is an apprenticeship in solitude, seeking, and suffering. The resultant ten letters from Rilke, published after his death, contain words of luminous intimacy where Rilke shapes the ecstasy of youthful desire into a consideration of how to live life deliberately. While a student, Franz Kappus began sending his poetry to a young Rainer Maria Rilke, seeking his advice.

Rilke letters to a young poet