I inherited many books from my older brothers—esoteric books from the 1970s on running and weightlifting, and Pietro di Donato’s classic novel Christ in Concrete, about an Italian immigrant family of laborers shattered by the death of their patriarch. But my favorite is Letters to a Young Poet, by Rainer Maria Rilke. It is a book that has been a seasonal refrain in my life. 

My copy is the 1963 paperback Norton Library edition with a blue and red checkered cover, translated by Mary D. Herter Norton (co-founder of the titular publisher). I was lucky to already have it when my college professor included the volume on our course reading list. 

Rilke led a fascinating life. A German poet who traveled across Europe—meeting luminaries like Leo Tolstoy along the way—he worked as secretary to the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. He believed in the salvific power of art, with much of his own work depicting human transcendence amidst suffering. Rilke’s Duino Elegies, a series of 10 poems written over a decade, are among his greatest works, along with The Book of Hours. 

The young poet to whom Rilke wrote his letters was Franz Xaver Kappus, a 19-year-old cadet at an Austrian military academy. A professor noticed Kappus reading Rilke’s poems on campus and revealed that Rilke was a former student of his. Soon afterward, Kappus wrote a letter to Rilke “in which I unreservedly laid bare my heart as never before and never since to any second human being.”

Out of the letters Rilke wrote to Kappus in the correspondence that followed, nine were written in 1903 and 1904. The final letter, from 1908, feels like an epilogue—a brief reunion that, as they often do, peters out. Yet the essential nine letters are fascinating ruminations on art, risk, solitude and faith. I return to them each year as a Lenten renewal. Letters are a rich genre for a season of reflection; they are deep, personal communications between strangers, united by art and language. I am drawn to Rilke’s letters most during this liturgical season because I am not a participant in them, but an observer. My communion with them is from a distance, and that is an essential component of Lent: we are called to ponder without immediate or direct response. We are compelled toward the silence.

Language and rhythm

As an undergraduate, I was the perfect audience for Rilke’s letters. I was a Catholic from New Jersey on a Lutheran campus in Pennsylvania. I was friends with Father Joe Celia, our campus priest. I had dinner at his rectory on Sunday, along with other out-of-state students. In fact, I met my wife at one of those dinners. 

As a reader and a writer, I was preternaturally drawn to artists like Rilke, whose Catholicism had faded from their life. Perhaps I was drawn to people like that, too. I’ve never been an ardent evangelist; rather, I’m drawn to how Catholicism remains a language and rhythm in their lives. For some, art lifts that mysticism toward the surface; art is like a vehicle of the incarnation, charging the world with attention. I feel that Lent works in much the same way; it is a familiar season, a song that people know, and its nostalgia can sometimes reawaken faith.

Rilke’s Catholicism suffuses his letters, but in an idiosyncratic way, as in his Book of Hours: “God speaks to each of us as he makes us,/ then walks with us silently out of the night.” Although Rilke is often read as a writer of ambiguity, I find him to be one of figures: forms enfleshed. Christ hanging down from the cross—skin and muscle and bone on that wood—that is the poetic core of Catholicism. As a young writer, I was especially drawn to Rilke’s spiritual tone, how “the expanse of one’s own solitude” is “itself work and status and vocation.”

Yet when Rilke wrote to Kappus, he was less than a decade older than his correspondent, composing the first letter when he was 27. Rilke wasn’t quite writing in the mode of an aged mentor; rather, as some have noted, he was writing to a shadow of himself. Rilke had also once attended a military academy and had been a young(er) poet.

Kappus initially sought literary advice from Rilke, and the poet delivers in his first letter, in a rather direct way. He tells Kappus that “your verses have no individual style, although they do show quiet and hidden beginnings of something personal.” Kappus wanted a critical response, and he got one: Rilke told him to stop worrying what others thought of his poetry. “You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way,” Rilke affirms: “Go into yourself.”

Rilke tells the younger poet that it all comes down to a question that you “ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write?” If the answer is yes, “then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.” 

Even after one letter, I could see why my professor had us read them. Art exists at the nexus of technique and mysticism. Writing comes from methods lifted by the mystical: the beauty of phrases, the surprise of a story’s ending—all mysteries that feel like whispers of God. As young writers, we had to believe in what we were doing. To be an artist was an almost religious action.

I had always wanted to write, but at some point in college—about when I was discerning the priesthood, which was also the time I met my wife at Father Joe’s rectory—I discovered that writing was my vocation. I needed Rilke’s letters in the same way that Kappus did. Like all young writers, I required both encouragement and criticism. Without a balance, we topple. 

A vision of art

Rilke’s first letter lays the spiritual foundation for his vision of art. Kappus had expressed frustrations when the world around him was rather mundane and did not meet his poet’s expectations. Rilke writes back,“If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it, blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.” 

The poet is advising his younger correspondent to see the surrounding world with a more sensitive eye. The advice arrives with a Lenten hue; it is easy to rail against the unfair or simply bland world around us, but better instead to seek beauty, however scant. For in doing so we affirm an incarnational vision. Lent calls us to open our eyes and let the scales drop. Rilke tells Kappus that two books “are always among my things, wherever I am…the Bible, and the books of the great Danish writer, Jens Peter Jacobsen.” 

At night, Rilke would read Chapter 30 of Job: “And now my soul is poured out within me;/ days of affliction have taken hold of me./ The night racks my bones,/ and the pain that gnaws me takes no rest.” He paired that nightly chapter with the poetry of another person haunted by Catholicism, Charles Baudelaire. The French poet’s interest in the occult rankled his devout mother—like Rilke, Baudelaire strayed from his mother’s belief. Baudelaire summed up his existential burden well, saying that all men had “two simultaneous and contradictory attractions—one towards God and one towards Satan.” 

Despite Rilke’s work being influenced by such solemn figures, his advice in the letters to Kappus is not funereal. When it comes to art and spirit, Rilke is an optimist. In a later epistle, he encourages Kappus to avoid “aesthetic criticism,” which is often “partisan views, petrified and grown senseless in their lifeless induration, or they are clever quibblings in which today one view wins and tomorrow the opposite.” Although I believe that good criticism is itself an art, Rilke’s advice is well taken. He wants his younger correspondent to find meaning in his work, not in the reception that work receives.

Rilke was gentle with Kappus. He often prefaces his letters with an apology for the delay in response: “first it was work, then interruptions and finally a poor state of health that again and again kept me from the answer.” It is as if Rilke wants Kappus to appreciate the ephemeral nature of existence. “Let life happen to you,” he says. “Believe me: life is right, in any case.” 

When I first read Letters to a Young Poet, I was writing fiction and poetry. Now, more than 20 years later, I write more nonfiction, a genre that feels like a perpetual examen. Prayerfully reviewing one’s day aligns with the work of drafting, revising and editing essays. It is like a furnace for my soul; in trying to get the right sound and sense, I am refining myself.

I still love Letters to a Young Poet, for it reminds me that our dialogue with others can and should be kenotic. To authentically converse with someone means to give of one’s self, and a letter is the self laid bare, in the added vulnerability of sentences. Rilke writes: “For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.” A great sentiment for art, and a perfect sentiment for Lent, a season in which prayerful attention toward ourselves is meant to bring us closer in dialogue with God.

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Nick Ripatrazone has written for Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The Paris Review and Esquire. His books include Ember Days, a collection of stories and Longing for an Absent God: Faith and Doubt in Great American Fiction.

Nick Ripatrazone has written for Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The Paris Review and Esquire. His books include Ember Days, a collection of stories and Longing for an Absent God: Faith and Doubt in Great American Fiction.