Like everyone else I needed occasional reassurance, a word of approval, a warning against some weakness; but I knew, somehow, what Rilke’s words now … - Denise Levertov

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Like everyone else I needed occasional reassurance, a word of approval, a warning against some weakness; but I knew, somehow, what Rilke’s words now stated for me, that the underlying necessity was to ask not others but oneself for confirmation. And he specified the primary question not as “Is what I have written any good?” but rather, “Must I write?” I came at some point to recognize that when he says Herr Kappus ought to continue only if he could honestly answer “Yes,” he meant the question (for every poet) to be a perennial one, not something asked and settled once and for all. Likewise, when, in the same letter, he states that “a work of art is good only if it has grown out of necessity,” he is not merely repeating that injunction; the first imperative had to do with an initial sense of being inexorably drawn to the making of poems, while this second one demands that the poet apply the same standard to each separate work.