Verse and bygone days
Insights into the craft of poetry:
Once a young poet writing to Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the greatest
poets in the 20th Century Europe requested him to do a review of some of
his poems.
Rilke refused to do so. Instead he wrote in his letters to this young
poet, on how to look at life and the world with eyes of a poet. The
correspondence spanned for six years. The young poet had the letters
published in 1929, three years after Rilke’s death.
Though almost insignificant in size when compared to the vast number
of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetic works, these ten letters have become a
handbook, a teaching tool for creative writers.
Rilke in his letters discusses many themes. Creative writing and the
prerequisites of the task, love, career choices and conjugal rights are
some of them. Nevertheless most useful for a young creative writer would
be his concepts in relation to creative writing mentioned in these
letters.
In the first letter of Letters to a Young Poet he says that it is not
everybody who could be a poet, a creative writer. How could one find
out? ‘There’s 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. Ask 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? Dig into yourself deep for an answer. If the answer
rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong
simple ‘I must’ then build your life in accordance with your necessity.
Many young people wish to become poets, but it is only a few who can
become such, he says. “One should have an urge from within-from one’s
innermost soul, an intense urge to write.”
A writer should work hard at the poetic craft to discover one’s own
distinctive perspective of the world. Rather than be a follower of
someone or mimicking someone’s work, the young poet should dig deep into
himself or herself for his or her own unique voice-authenticity says
Rilke.
Rilke talks much about solitude in his letters. He sees it as an
essential prerequisite for a true artist. ‘What is necessary, after all,
is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and
meet no one for hours - that is what you must be able to attain.
To be solitary as you were when you were a child, when the grown-ups
walked around involved with matters that seemed large and important
because they looked so busy and because you didn’t understand a thing
about what they were doing.’ PR |
