Letters to a Young Poet Read Free Page A

the long pathway to abundance.’ In a letter to Rodin himself, written just after the final letter to Kappus, Rilke spelled out one moral of the master’s ‘tenacious example’: ‘ordinary life … seems to bid us haste’, but patience ‘puts us in touch with all that surpasses us’. Practised in the present, patience is the art of courting the future. It belongs to becoming rather than being, to the unfinished rather than the completed. It is not so much suited to heroes as to invalids and convalescents, those who must wait.
    The flowering of any creative ‘summer’ will come, Rilke tells Kappus, ‘only to those who are patient, who are simply there in their vast, quiet tranquillity, as if eternity lay before them. It is a lesson I learn every day … :
patienc
e is all!’ Patience means sittingwith the work even when – especially when – nothing appears to be happening.
    The situation in which Rilke wrote the first
Duino Elegy
is again instructive. Marie Taxis later told the story: ‘One morning he received a tedious business letter. Wishing to deal with it right away, he had to sit down and devote himself to figures and other dry matters. Outside a strong bora was blowing …’ Descending from the castle to the bastions overlooking the sea, ‘Rilke walked back and forth deep in thought, preoccupied with his answer to the letter. Then all at once … it seemed to him as though in the roar of the wind a voice had called out to him: “If I cried out, who could hear me up there among the angelic orders?”’
    Having received the first line, Rilke set to work and, by nightfall, the first elegy was on paper. ‘The
Duino Elegies
were not written,’ observes William Gass, ‘they were awaited.’ Awaited in patience of course, though in this case patience had a curious added detail, that ‘tedious business letter’. Should we count such annoyances as belonging to the geography of solitude? I think so. They are the distractions that force attention to wander, the catalysts of not-doing. All art requires effort but effort alone does not makethe work, and distractions (so long as they are contained in solitude) are therefore useful. They are like the palladium atom that lets the carbon atoms bond, never itself becoming part of the new compound. That tedious business letter does not appear in the
Duino Elegies
, but there might be no elegies without it.
    Here it should be said that Rilke never tells Kappus that a poet might find distraction useful. The letters to Kappus paint a grand portrait of how a poet works, and it will be worth pausing to interrogate that grandeur. I myself have often been put off by the extremity of Rilke’s language. His modifiers are consistently superlatives: there is no deep but the deepest, no quiet but the quietest. Works of art are not just solitary but ‘infinitely’ so. Rodin did not only teach art but art’s ‘profundity and eternity’. References to ‘purity’ abound: irony ought to be ‘used purely’, feelings ought to be ‘pure’, sexuality ought to be ‘entirely mature and pure’.
    There is not much space in Rilke’s vision for many of the things that were to happen later in twentieth-century art – for composition practices that rely on chance, for example, or the writing of what Pablo Neruda called ‘impure poetry’ (poetry ‘corroded asif by acids, steeped in sweat and smoke, reeking of urine …’). No, in Rilke we find ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’ rather than chance, and the desired ends are all of them highly refined. Approaching his elevated language a century after these letters were written, it is hard to resist offering a psychoanalytic reading. Surely what we have here is not just grandeur but grandiosity, the mind’s reflexive response to the fear and anxiety that Rilke so clearly felt.
    As plausible as that reading may be, however, it is worth asking if there isn’t a way to approach Rilke’s extremities on terms that he himself might