Letters To A Young Poet

Chronicle, 1903-1908 (Letter One)

Letter One

He went to Paris toward the end of August 1902 with the purpose of preparing himself for this agreeable task, and incidentally of studying at the libraries under the guidance of the Vicomte de Vogüé, the French historian and critic, who was a connoisseur of things Russian. Rilke at this time spoke French only haltingly, although he had been brushing up at the Berlitz School in Bremen before coming, and this caused him to be shy at first of meeting people and gave him particular embarrassment when he first met Rodin. He says that the omnipotence of the language saddened him, but it must have been a challenge, for he was already writing verse in French. 

We know from the poignant observation in his descriptions that he was busy taking in all the external details that make the charm of that irresistible city--bridges, streets, soft skies, smells, sounds and sights, buildings, populace--and that in later years and in other moods he felt drawn to Paris. But his first impressions were little short of terrible. He found the city strange, inimical, resembling in its excitements, its iniquities and beauties, those biblical cities which the Lord rose up to destroy. He felt alone and rejected of these people, frightened in the foreign turmoil and all the implications of their lives, yet through his sympathy and interest in humanity's concerns torn out of himself into their existences. The newspapers shocked him with their exciting accounts of crime, show-windows with pictorial expositions of disease; he understood why "hospitals are always occurring in Verlaine and Baudelaire and Mallarmé." Much of this feeling about Paris is of course recorded in the Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laudris Brigge,* and many of the episodes there noted are, notwithstanding Rilke's wish that the book as a whole should not be so regarded, directly autobiographical. Before going to sleep, for example, he would read the 30th chapter of Job, which he says entirely expressed his own state, and in the night he would seek consolation in Baudelaire's Petits Poémes en prose, especially 

* The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge ( W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, 1949 ), formerly translated as The Journal of My Other Self. 

that one which runs "Enfinl la tyrannie de la face humaine a disparu, et je ne souffrirai plus que par moi-même," and closes with the paragraph "Mécontent de tous . . ." quoted in the Notebooks. Paris, he wrote only a few months later, "was for me a similar experience to the military school; as in those days a great fearful astonishment seized me, so now the terror seized me again before all that which, as in an indescribable confusion, is called life." 

He lived at first at number 11 rue Toullier--a brief little street close above the Sorbonne--the address which heads the opening of the Notebooks. Undoubtedly some of the gloom of these early impressions must have been encouraged by his surroundings: a dingy little Latin Quarter hotel, too much in the midst of the student world, in a depressingly narrow street which brought many opposite windows too near to his own, his evenings lighted by a smelly and wavering kerosene lamp. He moved after a few weeks to another little hotel nearby, at number 3 rue de l'Abbé de l'Epée, where he was living at the time of the first of these Letters to a Young Poet, and whence from his fifth-floor balcony he looked over gardens, then rows of houses, to the dome of the Panthéon, ". . . and sky and morning and evening, space. . . ." But even here the atmosphere oppressed him as much as before. In judging of his susceptibility to what are sometimes called morbid impressions, it is to be remembered that Rilke came--not strong and certainly hypersensitive by disposition to noise, to ugliness, to the physical wear of complex surroundings--from the quiet of a German-speaking lowland country to live, practically for the first time, alone to begin with and but a step removed from poverty, in the heart of one of the world's great cities; which fact by itself would account for a good deal of his sense of confusion and shock and dread. For he was not yet anchored in himself and in his work; he was one of those to whom such anchorage was forever being denied. 

He had come with a purpose, however, and the difficulties made him only the more determined to stay, because he felt that if he once got into work there, it would be very deeply, and for this he was waiting, preparing. His hours had been full of occupation. He would spend days at the Bibliothéque Nationale, reading French literature and history, or examining reproductions of twelfth- and thirteenth-century cathedrals. Other days he would spend in museums studying pictures and sculptures, acquainting himself in preparation for his work on rodin with the antique, the classic, the modern, seeing for the first time the great Botticellis and Leonardos, the venus de Milo (which was "too modern" for him), the Nike of Samothrace (which, on the other hand expressed the true Greece to him), the graceful world of Tanagra. The Panthéon he found a "kindly place"; Notre Dame grew upon him every day. It was a most important period in his development. 

And to all the disturbance Rodin was a "great, quiet, powerful contradiction." Behind his own restless unease Rilke was experiencing the influence that radiated from the immense calm strength of this great creative personality, that seemed to shelter him under its colossal impress "from the thousandfold fears that came later." Perhaps the most important single element for him in their association at this time, came through Rodin's philosophy of "toujours travailler" which Rilke so touchingly, and ever and again so vainly, sought to exemplify in his own life. For occupation however intent, study, reading, the pursuit of education or of information, have not for the artist that utmost satisfaction which both elates and calms, both inspires and exhausts, which comes only with his own creative activity. Here was Rodin, in daily and continuous preoccupation hewing and molding the visions of near a lifetime with that lifetime's acquired skill, while the poet Rilke was passing through a period of frustration. 

". . . very alone and very forsaken I go my way; and of course that is goos: I never wanted it otherwise. But all the fear and worry that came and grew with the happiness and the largess of the past year, has made that in me which creates weak and uncertain and timid. . . . But I am a very defenseless creature (because I was a very timid, lost, defenseless child), and when fate cries out to me I always grow quite, quite still for a long time and must remain so, even though I suffer unspeakably day and night from the no-longer-sounding. . . . Should one perhaps seek rescue in some quiet handicraft and not be fearful for whatever fruit may be ripening deep within one, behind all the rouse and stir? Sometimes I think it would be a way out, because I see always more clearly that for a person like me nothing is harder and more dangerous than trying to earn his living by writing. I cannot force myself like that to write at all; and the consciousness alone that some relation exists between my writing and the nourishment and needs of the day is enough to make work impossible for me. I must wait in stillness for the sounding. I know that if I force it it will not come at all. (It has come so seldom in the last two years.) . . . on bad days I have only dead words, and they are so corpse-heavy that I cannot write with them, not even a letter. Is that bad, weak? And yet God wills it so with me. . . ."

Thus he wrote to Ellen Key on February 13th, 1903, four days before the first of these Letters to a Young Poet. What notion of this state of mind could the youthful Kappus possibly have had? There may be by nature little in common between the artist who weaves his visions into words and one who transfers his through the sturdy and concrete technicalities of sculpture, yet something like the guiding assurance that Rilke could hold before young Kappus he was himself drawing now from Rodin.