Poetry & Philosophy of Creativity
Rainer Maria Rilke
The Poet Who Taught Attention as a Way of Being
Where to Start Reading
Letters to a Young Poet
Ten letters of advice to a 19-year-old aspiring writer. Covers solitude, patience, love, difficulty, and the creative life with devastating honesty. 80 pages. The single best book on what it means to take your inner life seriously.
Duino Elegies
Rilke's masterwork — ten elegies written over a decade about beauty, terror, death, and angels. Difficult but transcendent. The Stephen Mitchell translation is the most readable; Leishman/Spender for scholarly depth.
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Rilke's only novel — a young poet in Paris learning to see. Fragmentary, impressionistic, and unlike any other novel of its era. The prose equivalent of what his poetry does with attention.
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.”