Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (with Amanda Stern)

The History of Literature

Jacke Wilson

History, Books, Arts

4.6 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 8 June 2020

⏱️ 88 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the autumn of 1902, a young man attending a German military school wrote to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke to ask him for some advice. Rilke responded, and the two struck up a correspondence that has become one of the great moments in the history of literature. For more than a century, Rilke's advice, conveyed in ten letters and published as Letters to a Young Poet, has helped readers find answers to questions about literature, creativity, and the nature of existence. In this episode, Jacke is joined by author and literary impresario Amanda Stern for a conversation about her literary career, the struggles she had growing up with an undiagnosed panic disorder, and the impact that Letters to a Young Poet had on her. RAINER MARIA RILKE (1875-1926) was a German modernist poet whose innovative approach to poetry, expressed in poems like "The Panther," "Torso of an Archaic Apollo," and the collections Sonnets to Orpheus and The Duino Elegies, made him a leader in a style of poetry called "existential materialism" and a profound influence on subsequent generations of poets. AMANDA STERN is a native New Yorker, a novelist, a children's book author, and the host of the podcast Bookable. For years, she was the organizer of The Happy Ending music and literary reading series, which encouraged writers to take risks on stage. Her memoir Little Panic: Dispatches from an Anxious Life has been called "a creative feat and existential service of the highest caliber." Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/shop. (We appreciate it!) Find out more at historyofliterature.com, jackewilson.com, or by following Jacke and Mike on Twitter at @thejackewilson and @literatureSC. Or send an email to [email protected]. Credits: “Running Fanfare” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Photo of Amanda Stern by Jon Pack *** This show is a part of the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. We encourage you to visit the website and sign up for our newsletter for more information about our shows, launches, and events. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you're listening to The History of Literature, we'd like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows surrounding literature, history, and storytelling like Storybound, Micheaux Mission, and The History of Standup. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the Podglamorate Network and LIT Hub Radio.
0:07.0	And I said, I said, great, I'm leaving now and I'm going to get the book.
0:17.0	And I just left.
0:19.0	And I went and I got the book and I read it at Cafe Mogador on St Mark's Place across the street from my
0:26.4	apartment and I was shook I was just shook it was there has been no greater gift to me in my life than that book in that moment.
0:44.0	That's author Amanda Stern.
0:54.0	Talking about the book that changed her life, letters to a young poet by the German modernist
1:00.0	Reiner Maria Relka.
1:02.0	It's a curious little book, a good book for spring, a book that inspires
1:07.6	hope and optimism, and yet its message is one of solitude and even one might say despair.
1:16.0	Go into yourself. Rilka tells the young poet who reached out to him
1:21.4	no one can help you, nobody.
1:25.0	In ten brief letters, Rilka sets forth a credo so powerful it is reached across continents and decades, finding a home in the minds of millions,
1:36.5	including a young aching woman searching for answers at a Moroccan cafe in New York City.
1:46.2	Amanda Stern and Reiner Maria Relka
1:49.3	today on the history of literature. The Okay, here we go. Hello everyone, I'm Jack Wilson. Oh, I am so glad that you could join me today.
2:26.0	Even as America is in trouble, America is burning, America, well, let's save those thoughts for now.
2:35.4	We're not looking outside today, we're looking within.
2:39.0	You might say that's where we will find the right path, that looking in will be our salvation and maybe you are right
2:46.1	maybe that's what we should all try to do and if that's the case we have no better guide than our poet today,
2:53.8	Ryan or Maria Rilka, who's like a Virgil of the creative soul,
2:59.4	or the searching soul, Virgil, poor Virgil.
	...

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