Video and Podcast Resources On Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters To A Young Poet
seven lectures on these intensely personal and philosophical letters
A short text I teach fairly often in my philosophy classes, strictly speaking, isn’t a work typically classified as one within that discipline. As it turns out, this semester, students in all three of the classes (Foundations Of Philosophy, The Creative Professional In Context, and Philosophies Of Human Nature, and I’m teaching will be reading it.
Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters To A Young Poet is a work rich in ideas, observations, and suggestions for how we might understand ourselves and make our way through this complicated thing called life. It is a set of ten letters charting Rilke’s side of a correspondence that took place for several years with a young would-be poet, who attended a military academy and later was commissioned as and officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army. Franz Xaver Kappus would publish these letters after Rilke’s death, and readers since have derived great enjoyment, satisfaction, and wisdom by reflecting upon them.
The letters range over a number of different subjects, but keep circling back to a set of common themes, perhaps the most central of which is the need to develop within oneself what Rilke calls “solitude” (Einsamkeit), a metaphysical dimension and depth in the human person, which as the letters proceed we learn is essential to genuine love between developed people. Rilke also tells us at one point that all who deepen and expand their solitude share one single solitude.
The Letters have been translated from German to English many times by a number of various scholars and poets. The one I have my students read is by Stephen Mitchell, but I think you could profitably check out multiple versions and compare them with each other. If you can read German, you can find a copy online here, among many other places.
Rilke is a poet, novelist, and letter-writer whose works I have been reading and rereading since my college days, enjoying them, finding affinities with his ways of seeing things, and drawing upon them in a variety of different situations. I find that my students often respond in profound ways to him as well.
So some time back, as I began teaching the Letters To A Young Poet in my classes, I realized that I should develop resources on them to help students make their way through them, and get as much out of this work as possible. I found that seven core concept videos were enough to cover the entire work, and after producing those, I edited the sound files into a set of corresponding podcast episodes. Here they are:
Developing Solitude - watch video | listen to podcast
Criticism and Art - watch video | listen to podcast
Time, Patience, and Growth - watch video | listen to podcast
Conventions & Superficiality - watch video | listen to podcast
Sex, Love, and Development - watch video | listen to podcast
Sadness and Transformation - watch video | listen to podcast
Trust In Things - watch video | listen to podcast
There you have them then, seven lectures in both video and podcast form on this wonderful short work of thoughtful letters from one of the great poets of the early 20th century. I hope you find them helpful if you should make the plunge into this profound text.