Letters to a Young Poet

The more patient, quiet and open we are in our sorrowing, the more deeply and the more unhesitatingly will the new thing enter us, the better shall we deserve it, the more will it be our own destiny, and when one day later it “happens” (that is, goes forth from us to others) we shall feel in our inmost selves that we are akin and close to it. And that is necessary.

You are so young, you have not even begun, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart and to try to cherish the questions themselves

Then try, as if you were one of the first men, to say what you see and experience and love and lose.

Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you write; examine whether it sends its roots down to the deepest places of your heart, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you.

But that is just one of the most difficult tests with a creator: he must always remain unconscious, unsuspecting of his best virtues, if he does not want to deprive them of their unselfconsciousness and integrity!

And in point of fact artistic experience really lies so incredibly close to sexual, to its agony and its ecstasy, that both phenomena are actually only different forms of one and the same longing and felicity.

Do not write love poems; avoid at first those forms which are too familiar and usual: they are the most difficult, for great and fully matured strength is needed to make an individual contribution where good and in part brilliant traditions exist in plenty.

Discover the motive that bids you write; examine whether it sends its roots down to the deepest places of your heart, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you. This before all: ask yourself in the quietest hour of your night: must I write? Dig down into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be in the affirmative, if you may meet this solemn question with a strong and simple “I must”, then build your life according to this necessity; your life must, right to its most unimportant and insignificant hour, become a token and a witness of this impulse.

Get hold of the little volume called Six Tales by J. P. Jacobsen, and his novel Niels Lyhne, and start with the first story in the former book, which is called Mogens.

Even here they are round me : the Bible, and the books of the great Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen.5