Letters with a young poet (To groove Maria Rilke)

Presentation

Lettres with a young poet ( Briefe year einen jungen Dichter in German) is a literary work Rainer Maria Rilke published for the first time in 1929 at Insel with Leipzig. They are letters addressed by the Poète twenty-eight years, between 1903 and 1908, with an young man whom he does not know, Franz Xaver Kappus, junior at the military academy by the Empire Austro-Hungarian.

They were published in French translation at Bernard Grasset in 1937. The republication of 1987 in the collection of the “red Books” of Grasset underlines the range of this “true spiritual guide”, of this “handbook of the creative life of universal range”.

The Councils of elder

Franz Kappus is not twenty years old when it decides to write with its elder, author certainly young (Rilke is 27 years old) but enjoying a certain notoriety already. They are initially the doubts of this young pupil officer whom one hears through this correspondence. The young épistolier addresses to the poet as with a confidant likely to help it to overcome the alternative which tortures it: the military career or risks of poetry. Rilke answers the distress of sound puîné in these terms: “You ask whether your worms are good. It is with me that you put the question. You questioned others of them before. You send them to reviews. You compare them with other poems, and you worry so certain draftings refuse your tests. However (since you authorized me to advise you), I invite you to leave all that. ”

The correspondence is devoted very little to the technical problems of poetic creation. The Master poet unceasingly returns his pupil to itself in order to help it “to pass” towards the adult world and to occur with oneself: ” But the training is always a long period, one duration with share” , can one read in the seventh letter.

Poetry like seeks of an intimate truth

Return in yourself. Seek the reason which, at the bottom, orders you to write. Dig in yourself until finding the reason deepest. And so from this reversal towards the interior, from this diving towards your own world, from the worms come to emerge, you will not think of asking whoever if they are the good ones towards.

The success of the Lettres to a young poet is certainly due to this dimension quasi universal of the reflection of the poet. Rilke explores the intimate reason which determines the choices of existence that each and everyone can discover in oneself. Artistic creation appears, under the feather of Rilke, as the acceptance of what one is truly. Poetry seems authentic seizure of the world, like expression of a lived and assumed experiment: experiment of loneliness, the love, sadness, the melancholy, conformism and nonconformism.

Thus can one read in his last letter: “In any real situation, one is closer to art, closer to him than in the unreal semi-artistic professions which, while making believe that they touch except for the art of, deny of it practically the existence and approval, like makes for example entire journalism and almost all criticism and three quarter of what one names literature and who wants to be named thus. I delighted, in a word, to see that you prevented falling into these traps and that you remain valiant and solitary in the middle of a hard reality. ”

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