Letters to a Young Poet Read Free

fear, doubt, premonitions of death, ‘all unsettling, all pain, all depression of spirit …’
    Rilke’s simple suggestion is that the discipline of art demands a turning towards, rather than away from, such states of mind. They portend necessary labours and must thus be taken seriously. He asks Kappus to imagine that sadness indicates a moment ‘when something new enters into us’ and that we then have duties towards the unfamiliar thing. It may in fact be fate itself, a destiny which, with proper attention, we can absorb and make our own. ‘We have no reason to be mistrustful of our world … If it holds terrors they are
our
terrors’ and we should try to love them. They are like the dragons in old myth that, when approached directly, turn out not to be dragons at all but helpless royalty in need of our attentions.
    Whatever the exact metaphysics of such encounters, the point is that an exploration of the land of solitude cannot begin until we have acceptedsolitude as a fact (‘We
are
alone!’) and then faced the minatory moods that stand just inside its gates. And what happens after that? If acceptance comes and sadness is endured, what follows?
    What follows is a change of consciousness in regard particularly to time. The very first of Rilke’s letters to Kappus distinguishes between life’s ‘most inconsequential and slightest hour’ and the clearly more desirable ‘quietest hour’ of the night. This latter is not, I think, an hour at all. It has no knowable dimension. ‘All distances, all measurements, alter for the one who becomes solitary’, especially the measurement of time: ‘a year has no meaning, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree …’ Creative life contains its own temporality and the surest way to make it fail is to put it on an external clock. Mechanical time makes haste, as it were, but haste dissolves in solitude. In solitude we feel ‘as if eternity lay before’ us.
    Solitude can also mute the voice of judgement. Kappus included some poems in his first letter and he asked Rilke’s opinion of them. Rilke offered one (the poems ‘have no identity of their own’) but then set out to interrogate evaluation itself: by whatmeasure do we reckon a poem worthy or unworthy? Not by any measure that the outer world has to offer. Only one rule applies: ‘A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity.’ And how might a poet recognize this ‘necessity’? Only by making the ‘descent into yourself and into your solitariness’. In that isolated space, the world’s criteria drop away. When Rilke writes in the third letter that ‘an artist … must always remain innocent and unconscious of his greatest virtues’, I understand him to mean that questions of good and bad, virtue and vice, are foreign to the absorption of solitary work. As Flannery O’Connor once wrote: ‘In art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.’ Such has certainly been my own experience; in solitude (after a few days) the mind that weighs the work withdraws and I simply enter my material on its own terms. I may later find that what I have written is junk or that it is gold, but such labels have little currency in the confines of solitude.
    After all this has unfolded – after acceptance has arrived, after doubts have become helpers, after evaluation has quietened down and time has opened up – then what happens?
    Then nothing happens. Or, rather, then begins the practice of patience, a virtue in which Rilke had been schooled by Rodin. Rilke eventually published a book about Rodin and there he makes it clear that endurance was a necessary part of the older man’s talent: ‘There is in Rodin a deep patience which makes him almost anonymous, a quiet, wise forbearance, something of the great patience and kindness of Nature herself, who … traverses silently and seriously