Describe all that with fervent, quiet, and humble sincerity. Write about your sorrows, your wishes, your passing thoughts, your belief in anything beautiful. Cling to those that your every- day life offers you.

It requires great, fully ripened power to produce something personal, something unique, when there are so many good and sometimes even brilliant renditions in great numbers. Do not write love poems, at least at first they present the greatest challenge. Pretend you are the very first man and then write what you see and experience, what you love and lose. Your life, in even the most mundane and least significant hour, must become a sign, a testimony to this urge. And if it should ring its assent, if you can confidently meet this serious question with a simple, 'I must,' then build your life upon it. Put it to this test: Does it stretch out its roots in the deepest place of your heart? Can you avow that you would die if you were forbidden to write? Above all, in the most silent hour of your night, ask yourself this: Must I write? Dig deep into yourself for a true answer. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. You are looking outward and, above all else, that you must not do now. Well now, since you have given me permission to advise you, I suggest that you give all that up. You send them to publishers you compare them with other poems you are disturbed when certain publishers reject your attempts. In your kind letter accompanying them, you do not fail to admit to and to analyze some shortcomings, which I could sense while reading your verses, but could not directly put into words. However, the poems cannot yet stand on their own merit, are not yet independent, not even the last one to Leopardi, not yet. And in the beautiful poem 'To Leopardi' something akin to greatness and bordering on uniqueness is sprouting out toward fulfillment.

I felt that very thing most notably in the last poem, 'My Soul.' There, something of your inner self wants to rise to expression. Yet they possess a quiet and hidden inclination to reveal something personal. Having said these things at the outset, I now dare tell you only this: that your verses do not as yet have an individual style. Even more inexpressible are works of art mysterious entities they are, whose lives, compared to our fleeting ones, endure. Most happenings are beyond expression they exist where a word has never intruded. Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe. They always result in more or less unfortunate misunderstandings. There is nothing that manages to influence a work of art less than critical words. I cannot comment on the style of your verses critical intent is too far removed from my nature. I want to thank you for the deep and loving trust it revealed. Your letter reached me just a few days ago.

Rilke letters