Letters to a Young Poet
Ten letters, 1903 to 1908, from Rilke to Franz Xaver Kappus, a nineteen-year-old military cadet who wrote to ask whether his poems were any good. Rilke never quite answers; instead: go into yourself, love your solitude, be patient with everything unsolved. Kappus published the letters in 1929, three years after Rilke's death. It has been pressed into more young hands than any book of its kind, and the fourth letter's 'live the questions' may be the most useful advice a stranger ever mailed to another.
The oracle was twenty-seven, barely older than the cadet he was counseling, and the serene wisdom about solitude came from a man who spent his life slipping out of households and writing from patrons' castles. You also hear only one side: Kappus's letters were cut from the very book he published, so a correspondence reads as scripture. And a century of graduation gifts has worn the sentences smooth; you meet 'live the questions' on a mug before you meet it here. Read it anyway, slowly, alone.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
