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Comparing Letters To A Young Poet

Decent Essays

In Letters to a Young Poet, “Letter One” has very similar ideas and thoughts to the excerpts from Black Swan Green, “Hangman” and “Solarium”. In “Letter One” by Rainer Rilke, the central idea is that beauty is already in poetry but the author inputs his or her own flare to the already beautiful work. Rilke also explains that criticism does not make the rough edges round, because those rough edges make the piece literature unique. The ideas in “Hangman” and “Solarium” are similar but different. David Mitchell’s version of beauty in poetry is that the words the author chooses add beauty, but if all the words are beautiful that makes the beauty normal. In “Letter One”, “Solarium” and “Hangman”, there are similar yet different central ideas about beauty and its impact in poetry. In Letters to a Young Poet, “Letter One”, Rilke is writing to a young poet who wants his poems criticized. Rilke goes on to tell the young man how his poems are good but criticism does not help his work get better. Criticism is only an opinion that causes more harm than good. Criticism is a “loophole” to say negative things to or about one person and get away with it. Rilke goes on to give the man pointers on how he could improve, but does not say that anything is wrong with the poems and even goes on to say how courageous the man was because he wanted to be criticized. Some of …show more content…

The central idea for Rilke’s letter was how beauty is put into poetry and not made into poetry. While Mitchell’s book excerpts were about how beauty is preexisting and how too much beauty is bad. This brings both of the works of literature together because of the main point, beauty. Beauty is a word of different meanings. In Mitchell’s eyes, beauty is a preexisting entity that can be in anybody or anything but cannot be in mass quantities because then it is gone. In Rilke’s eyes, beauty is created and can be in any amount that is

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