Letters to a Young Poet

No one can advise and assist you, no one. There is only one way: go into yourself. Seek out the reason that commands you to write; discover if it has stretched out its roots into the deepest part of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would have to die if it were forbidden you to write.

Then turn towards nature, and try, like a First Man, to say what you see and experience and love and lose.

Do not write love poems; avoid at first those forms which are familiar and ordinary: they are the most difficult, for it takes a great, mature power to add something unique of your own, where there already exists a vast number of good and sometimes brilliant traditions.

describe your sorrows and desires, your passing thoughts and your faith in some kind of beauty—describe it all with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and use it to express yourself, the things that surround you, the images of your dreams, and the objects of your memory.

If your daily life seems poor to you, do not blame that: blame yourself. Tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor and unimportant place.

Even if you were in a prison, whose walls keep all the sounds of the world from addressing your senses—would you not then still have your childhood, this exquisite, royal wealth, this treasure-house of memories? Turn your attention there.

Try to lift up the submerged sensations of this distant past; your personality will strengthen, your solitude will expand and become a twilight space, where the noise of other people passes far in the distance. And if from this turning inward, from this submersion into your own world, come verses, then you will not think to ask anyone if they are good verses. You will not even make the attempt to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your cherished natural possession, a piece and a voice of your life.

A work of art is good if it has come to be from necessity. Its judgment lies in the manner of its origin, and in nothing else. And that is why, dear sir, I knew I had no advice for you but this: to go into yourself and to examine the depths from which your life springs; at its source you will find the answer to the question—whether you must create.

I only wanted to advise you also, to grow quietly and seriously throughout your development too; you cannot disturb it more violently than if you look to the outside and from the outside expect a response to questions that only your innermost feeling at your quietest hour can possibly answer.

If I were to tell you from whom I really learned about the nature of creation, about its depth and eternity, then I can mention only two names: that of Jacobsen, the great, great poet, and that of Auguste Rodin, the sculptor unequalled among all artists living today.—

Works of art are of an unlimited solitude, and can be reached by nothing so little as criticism.

All is gestation, and then birthing. To allow every impression and every germ of a feeling, all in itself, in the darkness, in what is unsayable, unconscious, unattainable by one’s own understanding, to complete itself, and to await with deep humility and patience the moment of birth of a new clarity: that alone is the artist’s life, in understanding as in creating.

There is no measuring with time, not even a year matters, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: to neither reckon nor count; to ripen like the tree, which does not rush its sap, and stands firm in the storms of spring, without anxiety that summer may not come after. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there, as if eternity lay before them, so carelessly silent and vast. I learn it daily, learn it with pain, am grateful for it: Patience is all!

And in fact artistic experience lies so incredibly close to sexuality, to its grief and its bliss, that both phenomena are really just different forms of the same longing and delight.

If you adhere to nature, to what is simple in it, to what is small and overlooked, but can so unexpectedly become great and immeasurable; if you have this love for things that are most small and wholly simple, striving like a servant to gain their trust, even though they are obviously poor: then everything will become easier, more harmonious, and at some level reconciled, maybe not in the sense of explicit understanding, which stands back amazed, but in your innermost consciousness, in wakefulness and knowledge.

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I want to ask you, as best I can, dear sir, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to have love for the questions themselves, like locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Do not seek out the answers now, which cannot be given to you because it you cannot live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then, without noticing it, you will gradually come, on some far-off day, to live your way into the answer.

And so, dear sir, love your solitude, accept the pain it causes you, and make a melody with it.