He won’t write you back. It’s true. No matter how much you want him to. You can write him anyway. We’ll listen. You’ll learn. We all will.

I began Letters to Rilke as an exercise in my Creative Writing class. We read Letters to a Young Poet  written to the young poet Franz Kappus, who was then 19 years old, from Rilke in Paris, 1903. Kaput wrote to Rilke seeking advice on the writing life and requesting feedback on the early drafts of his poems. Rilke’s reply was generous and a five-year correspondence between the poets began. My students and I find much about what it means to be an artist and a person in Rilke’s wisdom. We hope you will too.

With their permission, I publish my students’ letters here. Rilke loves them. He told me so.

You can learn more about Rilke here.

Read “Lou Andreas-Salomé, the World’s First Female Psychoanalyst, on Creativity and the Relationship Between the Mind and the Body, in Letters to Rilke” by Maria Popova at BrainPickings, too. You’ll be glad you did.