The Aesthetics of Silence and Moments of Being: Emotional Self-Preservation and the Refusal of Critique in Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet

Abstract

Silence is often interpreted as blank, meaningless, absent, and hollow, but in many ways, it can hold meanings deeper than words can suggest. Today’s moments are saturated with constant connectivity and sensory overload; the overflow of information from different social media platforms is blurring people’s own thoughts and authenticity. This paper re-examines solitude as a necessary space in the formation of self through a close reading of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet (1875-1926). Drawing upon Susan Sontag’s Aesthetics of Silence, the study seeks to find how Rilke destabilizes and refuses the standard criticism of a work of art through his letters to Kappus, emphasising inwardness, reflection, and understanding of the self and a writer’s own understanding of his creative process. Even though silence can be seen as a patriarchal erasure, repression, and absence of self-knowledge or opinion, this is the most crucial and sophisticated psychological space for a person to find themselves, to form their selfhood, to make choices and create decisions, and to meet the unspoken possibility of the language. Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet frames a total rejection of literary critique not merely as advice but as a crucial strategy of emotional self-preservation. The text provides a path to be true to one’s own self and cultivate an inviolable sanctuary of silence where creation remains the ultimate necessary process and self-discovery rejects outside opinion and market logic to form an embodied mind in the process of becoming.