LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET

Do not let yourself be governed by it, especially not in un-
productive moments. In productive ones try to make use of
it as one more means of seizing life. Used purely, it is itself
pure, and one need not be ashamed of it; and when you feel
too familiar with it, when you fear the growing intimacy with
it, then turn towards great and serious subjects, before which
it becomes small and helpless. Seek for the depth of things:
there irony never descends—and when you have thus brought
it to the edge of greatness, test at the same time whether this
mode of perception springs from a necessity of your being. For
under the influence of serious things it will either fall away from
you (if it is something non-essential), or else it will (if it belongs
to you innately) with gathering strength become a serious tool
and be ranked among the means by which you will have to
form your art.

And the second thing that I wanted to tell you today is this:

Only a few of all my books are indispensable to me, and two
of these are actually always among my things wherever I am.
Even here they are round me: the Bible, and the books of the
great Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen.® It occurs to me to
wonder whether you know his works. You can easily procure
them, for a part of them has appeared in Reclam’s Universal
Library in a very good translation. Get hold of the little volume
called Six Tales by J. P. Jacobsen, and his novel Niels Lyhne,
and start with the first story in the former book, which is called
Mogens. A world will come over you, the happiness, the wealth,
the inconceivable greatness of a world. Live for a while in these
books, learn from them what seems to you worth learning, but
above all love them. Your love will be repaid a thousand thou-
sandfold, and whatever your life may become,—will, Iam con-
vinced, run through the texture of your growing as one of the
most important threads among all the threads of your experi-
ences, disappointments and joys.

If I am to say from whom I have learnt anything about the
nature of creation, about its depth and everlastingness, there are

IS