Hermann Hesse : Letter to a Young Poet, 1910

Hermann Hesse

Letter to a Young Poet

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"Thank you for your charming letter and for your poems and stories. The letter expresses a confidence that I must, alas, disappoint: Even if I were not suffering from eyestrain and burdened by a much too heavy correspondence I would have to disappoint you, for what you ask of me is something I do not have to give.

You present me with your poetic efforts and request me to read them and then tell you what I think of your talent. You ask for severe judgment and candid appraisal, flattery will be of no use to you. Simply put, your question is: Am I a poet ? Am I talented enough to be entitled to publish poems and, if possible, to make writing my calling ?

I would like nothing better than to be able to give a simple answer to this simple question, but that is not possible. I consider it altogether out of the question to draw from sample poems by a beginner whom one does not know personally and intimately any conclusions about his lasting qualifications to be a poet. Whether you have talent can, of course, be made out, but talent is no rarity, the world is teeming with talent, and a young man of your age and education would have to be actually lacking in normal endowment if he were not able to write acceptable poems and essays.

Further, I will no doubt be able to see from your work whether you have read Nietzsche or Baudelaire, if this or that present-day poet has influenced you; I will also be able to see whether you have already formed a taste for art and nature, which nevertheless has not the slightest thing to do with poetic endowment. At best (and this would speak well for your verses) I will be able to discover traces of your experiences and attempt to form a picture of your character. More is not possible, and whoever promises on the basis of your early efforts to appraise your literary talent or your hopes for a poetic career is a highly superficial character, if not a swindler.

Consider this: it is not hard after reading Faust to pronounce Goethe a significant poet. It would be quite possible, however, from Goethe’s early works, and also from some of his later ones, to put together a slim volume of poems from which no one could draw any conclusion except that the young author had read his Gellert and other models attentively and that he had a knack for rhyming. And so, even with the greatest poets, the manuscripts of their first attempts are by no means always really original and convincing. In Schiller’s youthful poems one can find quite astonishing blunders, and in those of C. F. Meyer often complete absence of talent.

No, the judgment of young talent is not as simple as you think. If I do not know you intimately, I cannot tell at what stage of your development you are. Your poems may show immaturities at which you yourself will smile in six months’ time. It could be that favorable circumstances have brought to bloom in you just at this moment a. certain talent that is . incapable of further development. It may be that the poems you sent me are the best you will ever write in your whole life, but it is equally possible that they are the worst. Some talents reach their heights in a writer’s early twenties and then quickly-wilt; others first become evident in the thirties or often later.

And so the question of whether perhaps in five or ten years you will be a poet does not depend at all on the verses that you write today. But the matter has another side to which we should devote a moment’s attention.

Why do you want to be a poet ? If it is from ambition for fame, then you have chosen a poor field: the German of today doesn’t care very much about poets and gets along quite well without them. It is the same with making money: if you were to become the most famous poet in Germany (not counting the theater), you would, in comparison with a director or an assistant manager of a stocking or needle factory, be little better than a beggar.

But perhaps you have hit upon the ideal of being a poet because you see a poet as an original, a perceptive and a pious man, pure in heart, with delicate sensibilities and an exalted emotional life, a man who is capable of awe, who yearns for an inspired, in some way ennobled existence. Perhaps you see the poet as the opposite pole to the moneyman, to the man of power. Perhaps you strive for a poet’s career not on account of the verses or fame but because you feel that the poet only seems to enjoy a certain freedom and isolation but actually is responsible in the highest degree, and must dedicate himself totally if his poetic vocation is not to be a masquerade.

If this is so, then you are following the right road with your verses. But in that case too it is of no consequence — whether in time you become a poet or not. For these high qualities, tasks, and goals which you ascribe to the poet, that loyalty to himself, that awe in the face of nature, that acceptance of unusual self-sacrifice, that responsibility which is never satisfied with itself and gladly pays the price of sleepless nights for a successful sentence, a well-turned phrase — all these virtues (if we may call them so) are the hallmarks not only of the true poet. They are the hallmarks of the true human being per se, of the unenslaved, unmechanized man, of the reverent and responsible human being, no matter what his profession.

Now if you have this ideal of a human being, if you are not inspired by a desire for notoriety and fame, money and power, but rather desire a life centered in itself and unshakable by worldly influences, then, to be sure, you are not yet a poet, but you are the poet’s brother, you belong to the same species. And then too there is profound meaning in the fact that you write poetry.

For writing poetry, especially when one is young, does not have just one social function, that of bringing pretty works of art into the world and through them delighting or exhorting; rather, writing poetry can have, completely independent of the worth and possible success of the poems produced, an irreplaceable value for the poet himself. In earlier ages writing poetry was as a matter of course considered part of the development of a young man’s personality. To follow the way of the poet, not simply to practice the use of language but to learn to know oneself more profoundly and more accurately, to advance one’s individual development farther and higher than the average of mankind succeeds in doing, through setting down unique and wholly personal psychic experiences, to see better one’s own powers and dangers, to define them better — that is what writing poetry means for the young poet, long before the question may be raised as to whether his poems perhaps have some value for the world at large.

The word “personality” today no longer implies an unqualified ideal as it did, for instance, in Goethe’s time. From both the bourgeois and the proletarian side the unique personality is rejected as an end in itself — there is no attempt to rear outstanding individuals but rather normal, healthy, hard-working, average people. The factories thrive on this. But in a very short time, in Germany for instance, it has become obvious that vital functions of the body politic suffer damage and deathly crisis when there is a lack of that energy, responsibility, and inner purity which can be produced only by the high-minded individual. The horrifying deterioration of political activity, of party action and of parliamentarianism, shows this lack clearly, and those very parties that made it impossible for a man even slightly above the average to remain in their midst now belatedly cry out for a “strong man.”

Pay no attention if you have to put up with some teasing from your friends because of your poetry. Perhaps it will help you to mature and to attain a somewhat higher stage of humanity than is possible for the masses. Perhaps after a while you will find quite by yourself that for you poetry is dispensable — not in order to make a base peace with mediocre ideals but to gain for yourself in other fields that nobler, more worthy, more inspired kind of life to which you feel yourself called."

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