A fair amount of the advice Rilke offers in Letters to a Young Poet might seem daunting and hard to accept, especially since he emphasizes the importance of embracing difficulty, solitude, and even sadness. But above all, he urges the young poet to develop a quiet, levelheaded sense of patience, which will help him when he grapples with life’s many difficulties. If Kappus is willing to patiently work through feelings like doubt and sadness, he will only stand to benefit from the experience. Patience therefore becomes a necessary skill for anyone who wants to lead a thoughtful, poetic life.
In some ways, the kind of patience Rilke has in mind is straightforward and practical. For instance, in his very first letter to Kappus, he warns the young man about attempting difficult poetic forms before he’s ready. He tells him, in other words, to patiently let his poetic talents develop before he plunges into more challenging waters. His advice is practical and tangible, but it also feeds into Rilke’s larger ideas about developing a patient sense of self-assurance. Although he thinks the young poet should wait to work on challenging poetic forms, he also tells him to trust himself and his own artistic intuitions. Kappus should have faith in himself—and according to Rilke, having faith in oneself means letting opinions take shape slowly, giving them the time to form in “undisturbed development.” He insists that “everything is gestation and then bringing forth,” essentially highlighting the value of allowing ideas to gradually build—allowing them to “gestate”—for however long is necessary. And once these ideas are fully formed, it will be that much easier for the young poet to confidently stand by his own worldview, ultimately suggesting that slow, unhurried thoughtfulness provides a path toward self-assurance and peace of mind.
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Patience and Self-Assurance Quotes in Letters to a Young Poet
With nothing can one approach a work of art so little as with critical words: they always come down to more or less happy misunderstandings. Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures.
You ask me whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now (since you have allowed me to advise you) I beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody.
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.
Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them. Consider yourself and your feeling right every time with regard to every such argumentation, discussion or introduction; if you are wrong after all, the natural growth of your inner life will lead you slowly and with time to other insights. Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything. Everything is gestation and then bringing forth.
Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything!
If you will cling to Nature, to the simple in Nature, to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you, not in your intellect, perhaps, which lags marveling behind, but in your inmost consciousness, waking and cognizance.
You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.
I believe that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension that we find paralyzing because we no longer hear our surprised feelings living. Because we are alone with the alien thing that has entered into our self; because everything intimate and accustomed is for an instant taken away; because we stand in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain standing. For this reason the sadness too passes: the new thing in us, the added thing, has entered into our heart, has gone into its inmost chamber and is not even there any more,—is already in our blood. And we do not learn what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing has happened, and yet we have changed, as a house changes into which a guest has entered.
So you must not be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; […]. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any agitation, any pain, any melancholy, since you really do not know what these states are working upon you?
If there is anything morbid in your processes, just remember that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself of foreign matter; so one must just help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and break out with it, for that is its progress. In you, dear Mr. Kappus, so much is now happening; you must be patient as a sick man and confident as a convalescent; for perhaps you are both.
And your doubt may become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become critical. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perplexed and embarrassed perhaps, or perhaps rebellious. But don’t give in, insist on arguments and act this way, watchful and consistent, every single time, and the day will arrive when from a destroyer it will become one of your best workers—perhaps the cleverest of all that are building at your life.
