Letters to a Young Poet
by Rainer Maria Rilke • Transl. M.D. Herter Norton (1934)
Letter One: Paris, February 17, 1903
"Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write..."
You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading its roots in the deepest places of your heart.
This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be in the affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple 'I must,' then build your life according to this necessity.
Letter Four: Worpswede, July 16, 1903
"Live the questions now..."
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.
Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Letter Seven: Rome, May 14, 1904
"Love between two human beings is perhaps the most difficult task of all"
To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is even prep work.
Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving up, and uniting with another. It is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself for another's sake.
Letter Eight: Borgeby gård, August 12, 1904
"On sadness, grief, and what enters into us"
You have had many and great sadnesses, which passed by. But please, consider whether these great sadnesses have not rather gone through the center of your heart? Whether much in you has not changed, whether you have not somehow, somewhere in your being, undergone a change while you were sad?
Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
End of Volume
Original German letters written 1903–1908, first published 1929. English translation by M.D. Herter Norton (1934, W. W. Norton & Company). Brief excerpts shared for reflection only — the translation remains under copyright; please seek the publisher's edition for the complete letters.