Letters to a Young Poet (1903)
carrothers.com
carrothers.com
- It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.
- Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.
- I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.
- This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.
Reading it, I was disapointed. It paints the support from Rike, an experienced and depressed poet, to a young and depressed one.
While I can perceive the moral aid it can bring, I didn't benefit from it. It's full of never desmontrated general advices with no given first step to be applied, and often, not even practical applications.
He is a poet after all, and those lines are not meant to be a self help book.
So sure, they are well written, the author can relate to the human condition, and the particular suffering of the receiver. But no matter how you present it, hearing "follow your passion", "don't listen to critics" and "that's life" once more is not adding anything to my current state of understanding of the world.
One could argue that it's more of an aesthetic exercice, and if you look at it that way, it's a success. The prose is touching and clear.
You could also say that the content will speak more to people struggling with the process of art, or just being true to yourself. However, the author offers descriptions, weak analysis, and no solutions. He admits himself that he is still stuck at the same level.
If one craves empathy, or to ear that somebody shared the same hardship, I imagine it can be therapeuthic.
But I learned little from those letters, didn't enjoy it, and didn't benefit their from support.
Maybe you will. It's a short book, so it's not a big time sink.
If you read the first paragraphs and don't feel like carring on, you don't need to go further. It doesn't transform into something different on the way.
tl;dr "c'est en forgeant qu'on devient forgeron"
Edit: one exercise from soviet education (no idea if this is still done in modern russia) I'd think worth stealing is that the teacher would pick a selection of famous lines out of a poem, and ask the class to write their own verses around one of them.
If I remember the story correctly, the chorus to Leningrad's "In [St.] Peter[sburg] we booze" was inspired by a line "Peter — endure, endure" from a classical russian poem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ugivNRYfjc
I found that it works great in programming too: take a very beautifully crafted code, remove some bits, and ask the students to fill in the blanks, or wrap something around it.
The students then gain many things out of it:
- they practice reading someone else code
- they have to understand a problem to solve from context
- they get to craft a solution to that problem
- they don't have to start "from scratch", which is easy to do for simple problems, but hard as soon has you dwelve into advanced concepts
Above all, like the soviet education exercice, one untold benefit is that they get to see the beautiful code itself. It's not only inspiring and driving their efforts, it builds taste.
Thought this was pretty funny, although I may have misunderstood. Regardless, I loved this piece.
So I think Rilke was saying he won't attempt criticism (won't talk about technical details such as rhythm or structure or vocabulary) because none of that matters until the poet has something to communicate (has found their voice, a style of their own) in their poetry.
For an athlete, it might be that it's not useful attempting criticism of the finer points of their checking technique ("keep your elbow further in during a shoulder check") if they haven't yet figured to skate to where the puck is going ("skating to where the puck has been" being equivalent to paying too much attention to what outsiders are saying).
Returning to the comics metaphor, imagine if Rilke were trying to nicely say "these model sheets you've sent are technically slick, but they all look like Marvel characters ... what do your characters look like?"
(at which point I guess Rule 63 might be the equivalent of the poetry exercise in the sibling thread: it constrains a lot of decisions as to style, tone, etc. yet the gender swap forces one to make decisions of one's own)
(Theodore Roosevelt's 1903 State of the Union speech had a Flesch-Kinkaid score of 15,1. But then again, apparently even Queen Elizabeth's christmas messages have become measurably less posh over her lifetime)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/feb/12/st...
To be clear, her reduced 'poshness' is due to changes in her pronunciation over the years, not the content or reading age required. She has moved to a more generic southern English accent rather than the 'cut glass' accent of the upper classes when she was born, in which 'house' would be pronounced 'hice' and 'trousers' as 'trizers'.