The Relationship between Travel and Creative Writing

Certainly, there is safety in remaining in one’s own hometown, circle of like-minded friends, or familiar spirituality. Remaining in a place or state of ease requires little experience of discomfort. Yet this complacency rarely affords one the powerful experience of being an adventurer, of stumbling upon ideas, truths, and perspectives that challenge one’s own closely-held worldviews. As William Wordsworth famously declared, “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility” ¹ The excitement and adventure of taking the plunge into an entirely new culture, mindset, field of study, or profession is an experience that yields the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” that one can eventually “[recollect] in tranquility.”

In other words, encountering a space or idea that opens one’s eyes to a new world results in thoughts and feelings that can fuel creative writing–in this article, specifically poetry. These thoughts and feelings, when reflected upon and written about after pondering the provocative experience, give way to art that captures the phenomenal experience of discovery.

Rilke’s Life

A poet that demonstrates this is the German Rainer Maria Rilke, whose most poetically prolific era was from the year 1899 to 1922. By the age of seven, Rilke was no stranger to exploring the colliding worlds within his own self. Grieving the loss of a daughter, Rilke’s mother, Phia, often dressed him in long girl’s dresses and encouraged his femininity, with which he felt uncomfortable. ²

At ten years old, Rilke became further accustomed to the experience of entering a world beyond one’s prescribed comfort zone. During the tender years of his youth, after having been forced to attend a military academy against his own desires, Rilke often sequestered himself away to a place of safety: the infirmary. Emotional and creative, it was there that Rilke first began to seek refuge in poetry. ³ While he later considered these early poems to be the embarrassing efforts of an amateur mind, the seed had been planted. ⁴ Rilke had discovered the art of turning his experiences as an outsider to feelings-driven poetry.

As his life wore on, Rilke began to seek adventure of his own volition. “Trust uncertainty” was a theme that practically radiated from Rilke’s writings. ⁵ While studying in Munich in 1987, young Rilke took advantage of the opportunity to visit two other countries with cultures vastly different from his own: Italy, where he discovered the hues of the Renaissance art that taught him that “the holy can be rooted in the body and in human relationship;” ⁶ and Russia, the landscape- and architecture-rich country of his fifteen-years-senior lover, Lou Andreas-Salomé.

During these years, Rilke penned The Book of a Monastic Life, which became the first installment of his greater work, The Book of Hours. ⁷ While Rilke would later reject his Catholic faith and therefore eschew much of the philosophy reflected in the Italian Renaissance art he observed, these years and experiences led him to contemplate deeply the role of art and faith, a world that would not have opened up to him had he not sought it outside the confines of his hometown and his parents’ dreams.

Rilke’s Poetry and Experiences

“We must not portray you in king’s robes, / you drifting mist that brought forth the morning,” Rilke’s fourth poem in The Book of a Monastic Life declares (1-2). ⁸ Having grown up in a Catholic home, ⁹ Rilke here encapsulates much of his frustration with the organized religion of his childhood. Rather than lauding the lavish stained-glass windows and paintings of the Gospel stories with which he was familiar, Rilke further exclaims,

Piously we produce our images of you
till they stand around you like a thousand walls.
And when our hearts would simply open,
our fervent hands hide you. (6-9) ¹⁰

With “you” referring to the God Rilke so desperately pursued, we read here Rilke’s belief that (albeit often well-meaning) attempts at restricting God to the cliches of organized religion “hide” rather than reveal God.

Later, in his sixth poem of The Book of a Monastic Life, Rilke muses of God, “If you should be thirsty, there’s no one / to get you a glass of water” (6-7). ¹¹This view of God–this pleading to provide a celestial Being with a glass of water that Rilke believed necessary–differs drastically from the all-powerful, impersonal God that Rilke had grown up believing.

“I have begun my life,” Rilke penned in his journal as he thoughtfully transcribed his heart’s musings into the poetry that would complete his book’s first section. ¹² It was not to his first breath as an infant that Rilke ascribed his beginning; rather, it was to the unfolding quest of venturing into previously unconsidered views of life and God. “I have hymns you haven’t heard” (1), ¹³ Rilke promises in the fortieth of The Book of a Monastic Life‘s poems, foreshadowing the coming years in which his mind and art would continue to expand as he sought out new worlds and experiences.

Now that Rilke had traveled outside his own culture and religious upbringing, he moved into the next section of his life from which The Book of Pilgrimage–the second segment in The Book of Hours–sprang. The years that produced this fresh array of poetry were born of Rilke’s marriage to Clara Westhoff, a woman who was a new world in and of herself. ¹⁴ She was quite unlike Rilke’s previous serious relationship in that he believed she was less complicated and more inclined to enjoy the daily activities of a typical housewife. ¹⁵ Their union bore a daughter named Ruth, who inspired much of Rilke’s second phase of poetry. ¹⁶

In the second poem of The Book of Pilgrimage, the very title of which points to travel and discovery, Rilke writes of his period of self-discovery, “I am strange to myself, as though someone unknown had poisoned my mother as she carried me” (3-4). ¹⁷

Again and again, the theme of pregnancy and childhood informs Rilke’s poems: in the fourth poem, addressing God, “I love you as I would love a son” (2); ¹⁸ in the sixth poem, once again addressing God, “I will know you / as one knows his only beloved child” (18-19). ¹⁹ Ideas of parenthood and generating life flow from this second book of poems. Rilke writes in the second poem,

I’ve been scattered in pieces,
torn by conflict,
mocked by laughter,
washed down in drink. (4-7). ²⁰

By this time, Rilke had experienced much of the uncertainty that a traveler’s life has to offer; these years began with the traveling of a human from single to married, from childless to parent. They eventually ended when Rilke and his wife, mutually deciding to devote their time almost solely to artistic production, left Ruth in her grandparents’ care. ²¹

The third installment of The Book of Hours is titled The Book of Poverty and Death. Rilke once again opened himself up to travel and wrote this third book during a stay in Viareggio, Italy in 1903. ²² Much of this was inspired by the self-denial of Saint Francis, whom Rilke studied throughout this new adventure. ²³ Rilke turned his Franciscan studies, his experiences with the tumultuous storms of Viareggio along the seaside, and a solitude that he found more lonely than freeing ²⁴ into the tragedy- and hardship-themed final book. We read in his first poem a sense of desperation that his previous poetry often did not include:

I can’t see the path or any distance:
everything is close
and everything closing in on me
has turned to stone. (6-9). ²⁵

Further on, in the fourth poem, Rilke shares with God his opinion of modern society: “Lord, the great cities are lost and rotting. / Their time is running out” (1-2). ²⁶ These final poems usually recount feelings of bleakness in contrast to the previously life-focused and wonderstruck feelings of before. He muses in the eighth poem, “Lord, we are more wretched than the animals / who do their deaths once and for all, / for we are never finished with our not dying” (1-3). ²⁷ He considers our human state to be worse than those of non-human creatures, as our poverty-stricken experiences subject us over and over again to a life worse than death.

In the final poem, even though it reflects a lightening of the tempest of emotions Rilke experienced as he wrote the third book, he writes,

I thank you, deep power
that works me ever more lightly
in ways I can’t make out.

The day’s labor grows simple now,
and like a holy face
held in my dark hands. (1-6) ²⁸

God is not a personal Being now; rather, Rilke refers to God as a “deep power” who is “like a holy face” (emphasis mine) rather than an actual being possessing an actual body. In this way, Rilke ends The Book of Hours by rendering God a being that is far less human than the one with which the book began.

Travel as Prompting Transformation

One need not wonder what would have happened had Rilke remained within the limits of his parents’ dreams for him, excluding himself from the adventures that marked his life. While perhaps he still would have found his voice as a poet, he would have lacked the experiences that led him to understand God in unconventional and ever-changing ways. Each period of travel shaped each period of his poetry: his travels to Italy and Russia shaped The Book of a Monastic Life, his travels to and from parenthood shaped The Book of Pilgrimage, and his travels to solitude and back to Italy shaped The Book of Poverty and Death.

Through it all, Rilke’s understanding of God and God’s world was ever shifting, ever changing, yet one thing remained constant: he never stopped questioning, seeking, reevaluating. Each new journey resulted in a new book–each new discovery was the result of travel-provoked “emotions recollected in tranquility.”

Pondering Rilke’s poems and their implications for the importance of travel to creative writing, I reflect upon my own experiences as a traveler. As I encountered Italian Renaissance art, just as Rilke did, I found myself moved. I studied the work of famous artists, such as Donatello and Brunelleschi and Michelangelo, and I was struck by these artists’ understanding of God. A devout Christian myself, the tenderness and humanity revealed through these masters’ depictions of famous Biblical characters like Mary and Jesus challenged my previous perceptions of saints and God as untouchable, remote beings.

Like Rilke, I turned these discoveries into poetry of my own. Later, I spent a year and a half in a small town in Sonora, Mexico and was, once again, challenged in my understanding of God. For example, many of my friends there used the informal “tú” rather than the formal “usted” (“tú” and “usted” are Spanish pronouns for “you”) when addressing God, a linguistic difference that does not exist in English because we only have one all-encompassing word for “you.” They furthered the idea of an approachable God, a theme that has since reappeared more often than not in my own writing. And now, as I reside in Tokyo, Japan, I am witnessing ways of worship and devotion that continue to prompt me to “recollect” these emotions into personal spiritual poetry. Relocating to new cultures has been necessary for these new discoveries, as I would not have as frequently encountered these sources of inspiration within my hometown in Illinois.

Rilke’s travel was not only geographic, nor has mine been. Sometimes, traveling for me refers to crossing oceans and experiencing other countries; other times, I “travel” by picking up a book that challenges my personal philosophies or by pursuing a friendship with someone who possesses worldviews quite different from my own. These experiences lead me to work out my thoughts and beliefs through poetry. I have found that traveling, whatever the form, is a crucial element to my creative writing process–a sentiment that Rilke, too, would confirm.

What do you think? Leave a comment.