RAINER MARIA RILKE

to do—his web of creation from his own inwards. A young man
or woman had only to write him a letter containing the words
art, or work, or love, or death, or God (and young people find
it very difficult to keep these words out of their letters) in order
to touch Rilke into activity. In such letters he always displays
modesty, gentleness and a desire to yield, as well as accept, the
secrets of the heart; his advice is usually very sound, and a
constant feature of his homiletics is his moral sure-footedness.
Of the ten letters that follow, nine were written within the space
of eighteen months, which were also months of important
development for Rilke himself. It is here that much of their
interest lies : they contain the leitmotivs that were to appear later
in his greatest poetry, and nearly all orders in the Rilkean
creation are represented, except the angels and the youthfully
dead—here, at least, are Solitude, and Difficult Love, and Seeing,
and Things, and the Building of God.

It will be well to recapitulate, as briefly as possible, the events
in the poet’s life that preceded his first letter to a youfi§
lieutenant in the Austrian army. René Rilke was born at Prague
in 1875, the delicate seven-months’ child of a father who fussed
and a mother who coddled him ; yet he was destined from birth
to be a soldier. From the age of ten he spent four years at a junior,
and six months at a senior, Military Academy, where he was
bullied and unhappy, and first began to build his defence-works
of solitude. He finished his studies at home, where he published
his earliest verses, which are musical, cleverly rhymed and glib
in the Humbert Wolfe manner. Stefan George, on the single
occasion of their meeting in Florence, told him that he had
published too early; “how very very right he was there!”
Rilke later wrote (Lefters 1921-1926, p. 61). All the conceptions
which were to prove most fertile for his art seem to have their
origin before 1900: maidenhood, solitude, private death, and
God as created not creator. By the turn of the century, and his
twenty-fifth birthday, he had published Laral Offering, Heinesque
and bitter-sweet verses largely concerned with Prague; Dream
Crowned, where he begins to brood over death ; Advent, which
shews new literary influences, including those of Jacobsen and
Dehmel ; To Celebrate Myself, where the authentic poet in him

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