Letters to a Young Poet
It would take a deeply cynical heart not to fall in love with  Rainer Maria Rilke'sLetters to a Young Poet. At the end of this millennium,  his slender book holds everything a student of the century could want: the unedited thoughts of (arguably) the most important European poet of the modern age. Rilke wrote these 10 sweepingly emotional letters in 1903, addressing a former student of one of his own teachers. The recipient  was wise enough to omit his own inquiries from the finished product, which means that we get a marvelously undiluted dose of Rilkean aesthetics  and exhortation.The poet prefaced each letter with an evocative notation of the city in which he wrote, including Paris, Rome, and the outskirts of Pisa. Yet  he spends most of the time encouraging the student in his own work,  delivering a sublime, one-on-one equivalent of the modern writing workshop:Go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at  its source you will find the answer to the question whether youmustcreate. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it.  Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that  destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from outside.Every page is stamped with Rilke's characteristic grace, and the book  is free of the breathless effect that occasionally mars his poetry. His  ideas on gender and the role of the artist are also surprisingly prescient.  And even his retrograde comment on the "beauty of the virgin" (which the  poet derives from the fact that she "has not yet achieved anything") is counterbalanced by his perception that "the sexes are more related than  we think." Those looking for an alluring image of the solitary artist--and  for an astonishing quotient of wisdom--will find both inLetters to a  Young Poet.--Jennifer Buckendorff