Letters To A Young Poet

Introduction

It was in the late autumn of 1902-- I was sitting under some ancient chestnuts in the park of the Military Academy in Wiener-Neustadt, reading. So noticed when the only civilian among our profesors, the Academy's learned and kindly Parson Horaček, came to join me. He took the volume from my hand, contemplated the cover, and shook his head. "Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke?" he asked reflectively. He then turned the pages here and there, skimmed a couple of verses, gazed thoughtfully into the distance, and finally nodded. "So our pupil René Rilke has become a poet."

And i learned of the thin, pale boy, whom his parents had sent more than fifteen years ago to the Lower Military School at Sankt-Pölten so that he might later become an officer. Horaček had been chaplain to that institution at the time, and he still remembered his former student perfectly. He described him as a quiet, serious, highly endowed boy, who liked to keep to himself, patiently endured the compulsions of boarding-school life and after his fourth year moved on with the others into the Military College, which was situated at Mährisch-Weisskirchen. Here indeed it became apparent that his constitution could not stand the strain, for which reason his parents removed him from the school and let him continue his studies at home in Prague. How the course of his life had since shaped itself Horaček could not say. 

After all this it is not hard to understand how i determined in that very hour to send my poetic attempts to Rainer Maria Rilke and to ask him for his opinion. Not yet twenty, and close on the threshold of a profession which i felt to be entirely contrary to my inclinations, I hoped to find understanding, if in anyone, in the poet who had written Mir zur Feier. And without having intended to do so at all, i found myself writing a covering letter in which I unreservedly laid bare my heart as never before and never since to any second human being.

Many weeks passed before a reply came. The blue-sealed letter bore the postmark of Paris, weighed heavy in the hand, and showed on the envelope the same beautiful, clear, sure characters in which the text was set down from the first line to the last. With it began my regular correspondence with Rainer Maria Rilke which lasted until 1908 and then gradually petered out because life drove me off into those very regions from which the poet's warm, tender and touching concern had sought to keep me. 

But that is not important. Only the ten letters are important that follow here, important for an understanding of the world in which Rainer Maria Rilke lived and worked, and important too for many growing and evolving spirits of today and tomorrow. And where a great and unique man speaks, small men should keep silence. 

Franz Xaver Kappus

Berlin, June 1929