Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke Page B

written hardly any of the work for which we read him nowadays. The fictive
Letter from the Young Worker
on the other hand was written nineteen years later in February 1922, the extraordinary February when he completed his
Duino Elegies
and wrote the
Sonnets to Orpheus
in what he called a ‘nameless storm, a hurricane in the spirit’. So it belongs to Rilke’s maturity, but as well as having preoccupations in common with the poems in whose company it arose, it connects to the letters to Kappus in ways that suggest that some of Rilke’s ideas and concerns, and his basic attitude to life, didn’t change very much.
    Rilke was one of the great letter-writers. He wrote them every day, often many more than one, and really his letters, not all of which have been published, can be considered an integral part of his work, as he intimated himself. He often approached the never-quite-superable task of keeping his correspondence up to date as a way of getting into writing, a way of putting something off and stealing up on it at the same time. The form of the letter, a text addressed to a specific person with no particular constraints, was clearly one which suited him. Quite extensive passages of his novel,
The Notebooks ofMalte Laurids Brigge
, were originally written as letters to Lou Andreas-Salomé and to his wife Clara. And the fact that he used a fictitious letter to channel the preoccupations of the
Letter from the Young Worker
shows how instinctive the epistolary form became. Writing letters was Rilke’s way of facing up to the world and locating himself in it, on a daily basis, and his poems were a more intense and more intricately ordered variation of the same process.
LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET
    Franz Xaver Kappus, the recipient and editor of these letters, says in his own prefatory remarks virtually all that is needed by way of introduction to them. He had written to Rilke enclosing some of his own poems on learning that Rilke had once been, as he himself now was, a military cadet and that they even had a teacher in common. This was enough to make Kappus feel that Rilke would understand the dilemma of someone firmly set on a military career but finding that his literary interests were in conflict with it. (In fact Kappus managed a kind of compromise, though not one Rilke would haveapproved of, becoming a successful writer of popular fiction after having served and been wounded in the First World War.) For Kappus, Rilke seems primarily to have been the author of
To Celebrate Myself
(
Mir zur Feier
, 1899), which was the last volume of Rilke’s poems to be written, with great virtuosity, in a largely derivative Art Nouveau style that was entirely of its time. Some sense of the kind of poetry this was can be gleaned from Kappus’s own poem ‘Sonnet’, which Rilke returns to him, written out in his own hand, with his letter of 14 May 1904. Rilke’s early poems were mostly better than this, but not dissimilar in mood and mode. But by the end of 1902, when he received Kappus’s initial letter, Rilke had also published the
Book of Images
in its first edition, and written most of the
Book of Hours
, and these poems, though still not his major work, are already far more individual. In fact Kappus catches him on the point of becoming the Rilke we read Rilke for today: ‘The Panther’, perhaps the best known of the
New Poems
, Rilke’s first incontrovertibly great book, seems to have been written in November 1902, and
Worpswede
and
Auguste Rodin
, the two books of art criticism which were important stepping-stones towards the syntacticalsubtleties and precise apprehensions of the
New Poems
, came out early in 1903. Rilke is coming into his own, and learning at an astonishing rate from the example of Rodin, whose working techniques and general way of being in the world he observed closely while writing his book on him.
    Writing to Kappus, Rilke was also taking a sympathetic step back into an earlier stage of his career, so that