He was a poet and hated the approximate

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

This is one of those books about which I have been hearing for years, never read, but found at the Granby Library Book Sale a few months back--50 cents seemed like a good price for it, so I bought it.  Now I have, at long last, read it.  But, I guess that was obvious from the fact I am now writing about it.

The book is a series of ten letters Rilke wrote to a young poet (hence the clever name of the volume).  What is it about?  Hard to say--it is about all sorts of things.  The Young Poet (Kappus) wrote Rilke, asking for criticism of his poetry.  Rilke wrote back with some advice, but no criticism, saying that a young poet should ignore all criticism, look deep within himself for inspiration and write, not worrying what anyone else would think.  In other words, writing poetry is like blogging--if you start thinking that you have an audience, then the whole enterprise becomes downright depressing--after all, where is the joy in ruminating about assorted odd details of life if one starts with the premise that said ruminations must be enlightening to others? Far better to imagine one's audience is oneself, and just write for the sheer amusement of the act itself.  Rilke notes that a young poet should start by asking himself if writing is as important as life itself, and if so, then it is worth writing.  I am not sure if blogging is worth life itself--if I could never write another word, would I be willing to go on living?  Somehow, I suspect I would.  Thus, I suppose the immediate conclusion is that I will never be a Great Blogger.  Which then sets the mind reeling.  There are Great Books, books which stand the test of time and are well worth reading 100 years after the book is published.  In a hundred years, will there be Great Blogs?  Is there a single blog out there, anywhere, which will be worth reading 100 years from now?  The answer is pretty obvious.

But, returning to Rilke, he ruminates about all sorts of issues in these letters, which means, oddly, that if he were alive today and not 100 years ago, he might have blogged about these issues.  (Does anybody still write letters these days?)  Are Rilke's reflections interesting?  It's hard to say.  He, like Dylan Thomas, writes in ways that cause one to wonder, "Is this deep and insightful or simply trite?"  Take, for example, this passage from Letter 8--and I'll note up front that the passage is longer than I would have liked to use, but the problem with these letters is that Rilke doesn't ever say anything concisely.

From Letter 8:
"We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it. 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. The fact that people have in this sense been cowardly has done infinite harm to life; the experiences that are called "apparitions," the whole so-called "spirit world," death, all these Things that are so closely related to us, have through our daily defensiveness been so entirely pushed out of life that the senses with which we might have been able to grasp them have atrophied. To say nothing of God. But the fear of the inexplicable has not only impoverished the reality of the individual; it has also narrowed the relationship between one human being and another, which has as it were been lifted out of the riverbed of infinite possibilities and set down in a fallow place on the bank, where nothing happens. For it is not only indolence that causes human relationships to be repeated from case to case with such unspeakable monotony and boredom; it is timidity before any new, inconceivable experience, which we don't think we can deal with. but only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being. for if we imagine this being of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it is obvious that most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth. In this way they have a certain security. And yet how much more human is the dangerous insecurity that drives those prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their cells. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and there is nothing that should frighten or upset us. We have been put into life as into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through thousands of years of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold still, through a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from everything around us. We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them."

Now, I think that is potentially quite interesting.  But, I am not sure.  It's like poetry in this respect--it hints at what it is trying to say, but doesn't say it explicitly.  The reference to Poe's stories is clever (now I want to go read some more Poe--I have the Library of America volume of Poe, so I have been slowly, in odd moments stolen here and there, been working my way through his complete collection of stories--Poe is Great, by the way, but I'll write a further review of him if and when I ever finish up the volume (at the current rate, that will be in about 2017--will blogging still exist in 2017?).  The general point (being made by Rilke, not Poe) is, I think, right, but a bit disconcerting---does a denial of the possibility of the bizarre really corrupt human relationships?

But, that is what Rilke is like--the letters are worth reading once.  I suspect they are worth reading multiple times.  I suspect I will reread them at some point.  But, I don't know that I will ever think they are Great.

And the even bigger question--if I knew a young poet who was graduating from high school, would I give this book as a graduation present? 

[The title of the post is a quotation from Rilke found in my copy of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. It is from The Journal of My Other Self.  I have no idea what it means.]