Rilke

1) You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid doing right now. No one can advise or help you--no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write?


2) Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose.


3) If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the Creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place.


4) But let me make this request right away: Read as little as possible of literary criticism--such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened & empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.





10/30/08 - Letters to a Young Poet (which is, as is a rarity in the literary world, a collection of exactly what it says) is the most encouraging thing I've read in years.