Book review of Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
1. Regardless of your major, you need to read this book.
2. It?s only 50 pages?a faster read than most Chinese take-out menus.
3. You REALLY need to read this book.
Letters to a Young Poet holds a col?lection of letters written by Rainer Maria Rilke, a 27 year-old writer, to Franz Xaver Kappus, a 19 year-old aspiring poet. While some of his advice is specific to creative writ?ing, most of it pertains to his phi?losophy on the life of a student: the benefits of solitude, the foolishness of young love, and the virtue of dif?ficult things. And it?s beautiful.
His comments on the stress of choosing a career path are whole?hearted, encouraging us to allow our passions and skills to dictate our future. We are intentionally created by God; therefore, we cannot fully trust God unless we trust ourselves, and the work that occurs through us. As Rilke commands, ?Take whatever comes, with great trust, and as long as it comes out of your will, out of some need of your innermost self, then take it upon yourself, and don?t hate anything.?
While he epitomizes the tortured artist, Rilke manages to make one feel as if sadness were a cozy sweater, a warm breeze, even a close friend. ?Bear your sadness with greater trust than your joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered you, something unknown?. We must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it.? Why are ?you so quick to shut out your pain when you have no idea what beauty it may be creating within you?
To be honest, his belief that one should ?be able to walk alone inside oneself and see no one for hours? fundamentally challenges my love of this campus? 24/7 community of hangouts. But the more I read of Rilke the more I found myself taking that walk and, even more strange, enjoying it.
Of course this review would not be complete (or not nearly as inter?esting) without including Rilke?s thoughts on love. He does not criti?cize the ignorance of young lovers so much as impress upon the reader its true nature?love is not the merging of two worlds, but one per?son?s decision to become the other?s world.
?Young people, who are begin?ners in everything, are not yet capa?ble of love,? not because they?re immature, but because ?it is something they must learn. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far into life, is?: soli?tude, a heightened and deepened kind of loneliness for the person ?who loves.?
Indeed, much of his writing reminds one of a closing exhorta?tion in one of the Apostle Paul?s letters: ?Be patient and without bit?terness, and realize that the least we can do is to make [our] coming into existence no more difficult for Him than the earth does for spring when it wants to come.?
Above all else, Rilke fills his readers with a sense of anticipation, transforming the simplest walk to class into an epic journey of infinite possibilities.
He preaches the mystery of the Gospel and thus a gospel of mys?tery when he writes, ?This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us.? If we believe that Christ was raised from the dead, why should we not expect to be pre?sented with something as equally breathtaking on our way to class?
I fervently proclaim Letters to a Young Poet as the Trinity Western University Student Handbook. The foreword reflects my own thoughts, having ?never heard a voice speak ?out of such deep understanding, with such authority.? Rilke lived an entire century ago, but at the time of these letters he was the same age as us. And you can feel it; ?I felt, as many readers have felt, that the let?ters were written for me.? It is my hope that you go find this book in the library and feel it too, because maybe they were.
Source: http://www.marshillonline.com/academy/on-shelf-with-justin-poulsen/
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