The Young Poet's Poems

The work of the Young Poet is referred to by Rilke several times throughout the book. The reader can see his poems as manifestations of the stages of the Young Poet's spiritual quest. For example, the description in Section 1, Letter 1 of the poems as juvenile and under-developed is in fact a description of the Young Poet himself. His first letter to Rilke is a reaching out, an expression of the conscious hope that the older, more experienced poet can help his work mature, and the sub-conscious hope that he can do the same for his creative soul. Then, the fact that the Young Poet's work seems to be missing (Section 4, Letter 6) can be seen as a sign that the Young Poet is himself missing, lost to himself, wandering in his unaccustomed solitude, wavering between seemingly conflicting definitions of himself and his work. Rilke's complimentary reference to the sonnet (Section 5, Letter 7) represents a stage of completion for the Young Poet, a point of beginning at which he is starting to understand and manifest Rilke's guidance. Finally, Rilke's returning a handwritten copy of the sonnet to the Young Poet makes the metaphorical suggestion that the true value of a work of art comes in the way it can be absorbed, understood, and transformed by others without its essence (a distillation of the artist's experience) being changed.