6 Pieces of Advice to a Young Poet

Life advice from “Letters to a Young Poet” by Rainer Maria Rilke

7 min readMay 10, 2025

These pieces of advice come from “Letters to a Young Poet” by Rainer Maria Rilke. Rainer was a poet himself and was exchanging letters with a young poet.

The letters are filled with interesting observations and helpful recommendations.

I hope these pieces of advice will serve you in your life and the art you choose to create.

1. Do what you’re called to do

“You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now (since you have allowed me to advise you) I beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward , and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all-ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple “I must,” then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.”

If there is something you feel an internal drive to do, do it.

Don’t worry about what other people will think or what the outcome will be.

I’ve been on my own journey with this building Twos. It started with wanting to create apps and then I wanted a tool like Twos for my own use. Now I’m fortunate enough to get to share it with other people.

Do what you want with your life since you’re the one who is going to have to live with your decisions and actions.

“If one could live without writing: then one must not attempt it at all.”

2. Be patient with your art

“There is here no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means. not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come . But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain, to which I am grateful: patience is everything!”

It will take time to develop your craft and produce your art.

Don’t rush the process or get upset with the time it takes.

I’ve been working on Twos for 10 years and it still isn’t where I’d like it to be. But, that’s okay. Great things take time and I enjoy the process every day.

Continue to show up when you’re called to.

“I must wait in stillness for the sounding. I know that if I force it it will not come at all. (It has come so seldom in the last two years.) . . . on bad days I have only dead words, and they are so corpse-heavy that I can not write with them not even a letter. Is that bad, weak? And yet God wills it so with me.”

3. Don’t pay attention to the criticism

“Read as little as possible of aesthetic criticism-such things are either partisan views, petrified and grown senseless in their lifeless induration, or they are clever quibblings in which today one view wins and tomorrow the opposite.”

It’s so easy to criticize and people do it for so many reasons.

None of those reasons are any good.

We receive plenty of criticism about Twos, but it usually comes from people who don’t want what we’re trying to provide or it’s just a misunderstanding. I’ll always push through and keep doing the work so long as it’s something I believe in. The work is never finished and the product is never where you want it to be.

Listen to feedback, but trust your process and what feels right. Keep doing that.

“Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them.”

4. Lean into the discomfort of solitude

“And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to break out of it. This very wish will help you, if you use it quietly, and deliberately and like a tool, to spread out your solitude over wide country. People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it. everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little. but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.”

We can use solitude as a way to listen and learn about ourselves.

Solitude helps surface all of the emotions we’ve worked so hard to silence.

I tend to get so busy that I’m painfully unaware of things. Taking time to meditate or to just do nothing, always unveils important things I need to do or things that I’d like to say to people.

Make more time to do nothing and push through the discomfort to see what arises.

“And this is why it is so important to be lonely and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and stark moment at which our future sets foot in us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and fortuitous point of time at which it happens to us as if from outside. The more still. more patient and more open we are when we are sad, so much the deeper and so much the more unswervingly does the new go into us. so much the better do we make it ours. so much the more will it be our destiny, and when on some later day it “happens” (that is, steps forth out of us to others). we shall feel in our in most selves akin and near to it. And that is necessary. It is necessary-and toward this our development will move gradually-that nothing strange should befall us, but only that which has long belonged to us.”

5. Understand your own self-doubt

“And your doubt may become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become critical. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perplexed and embarrassed perhaps, or perhaps rebellious. But don’t give in, insist on arguments and act this way, watchful and consistent, every single time, and the day will arrive when from a destroyer it will become one of your best workers-perhaps the cleverest of all that are building at your life.”

We’ve evolved for survival. It’s the only reason we’re still here.

Listening to the concerns and worries that we have are a great way to find out what we can be doing better.

Taking time to really listen to the fears I have always leads to something I want to do. It could be me thinking I’m fat so then I want to eat better. While it’s not good to be overly critical, it can help to understand why you are having these thoughts in the first place.

There is most likely a reason you are having the thoughts and something you can do for them.

6. Lean into the struggle of life

“How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.”
“If there is anything morbid in your processes, just remember that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself of foreign matter; so one must just help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and break out with it, for that is its progress.”

A better life is always on the other side of something hard.

It’s also usually easier than we make it out to be in our heads.

In order to create Twos, I’ve had to spend years learning, trying different things, running into issues, and solving problems. It’s not easy, but there is nothing more meaningful in my life. It brings me happiness and purpose every day.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

“Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you l ives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good . His life has much difficulty and sadness . . . . Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words.”

Read all of my notes on “Letters to a Young Poet” ⬇️