Letters to a Young Poet

Throughout Rilke’s letters to Kappus, he frequently espouses patience as a virtue worth pursuing. In the correspondence, the image of Kappus that emerges is of a young individual at once uncertain about himself and yet eager to launch into life. Rilke encourages avoiding rash action, and instead focusing on slowly developing his artistic sensibility: “Consider yourself and your feeling right every time with regard to every such argumentation, discussion or introduction; if you are wrong after all, the natural growth of your inner life will lead you slowly and with time to other insights” (23). One cannot rush the growth of their personality, artistic voice, and worldview, but must instead grant it the necessary time, all the while attending to one’s interior responsiveness to all experience.

Rilke paints a picture of an artist’s life that involves stillness as much as it involves active creation. Rilke writes that “being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap […] patience is everything!” (24). For an artist, patience is among the cardinal cultivable qualities, and it is only after forborne maturation that one can eventually produce good and lasting works of art, poetic or otherwise. As the correspondence continues, this notion of patience extends beyond its initial artistic meaning and becomes a general quality that all should aspire to in life. In his final letter to Kappus, Rilke writes that he hopes Kappus is “confidently and patiently letting that lofty solitude work upon you,” believing that it is only through patiently embracing his circumstances that Kappus will understand himself (57).