In offering advice to a young aspiring poet, Rainer Maria Riike specifically warns him not to read literary critics or editors because they will not understand the poet in terms of motive, spirit, or context. The poet must wait until the poem perfectly reflects these subjective elements, and has made them supremely manifest. This is the work of the poet not the editor.
Even so, the critic or editor seeks (consciously or not) to belittle anything short of their own notions of expression, making no attempt to understand the poet, less to accommodate or empathize with an alien notion short of the homogenized needs of the critic or the publishing house. This may be the self-perception of the editor, to shape the amorphousto conformity, to whittle the sculpture into a figure that is familiar to and pleases the critic. If the reply is that the editor is doing his job, then the poet must admit that he has not done (or finished) his own.
In finding the creative resources necessary to poetry, Rilke presents the exercise of self-awareness. Conscious understanding of the self and how it evolved into the present moment offered to the reader is prerequisite. This is intended literally. Discover in yourself how you came to be what you are, feel, do, today, here and now. “And even if you were in some prison the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses – would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories? Turn your attention thither. Try to raise the submerged sensations of that ample past; your personality will grow more firm. your solitude will widen and will become a dusky dwelling past which the noise of others goes by far away.” Extrapolate from the primitive emotions of childhood into the evolved present moment to reveal the direction of self, where it in now, where it needs to go. (The advice of Rilke is addressed to a “young” poet, but the advice applies at any time in life’s journey.)
Ultimately, self-awareness is the penetration into solitude that will reveal the most intimate self. “But your solitude will be a hold and home for you even amid very unfamiliar conditions and from there you will find all your ways.”
For the artist, the poet, and the creative, solitude is a refuge not only for self but for the objects of art that will be nurtured, grown, and given birth, given reality. At this point, the object (the poem) must feel not so much polished by the poet but, as Rilke puts it, “necessary.” In the end, the creation requires a crafted and conscious solitude that can nurture the deepest self, obscured by the world and even by the reluctant self.