In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, the only novel that poet Rainer Maria Rilke ever wrote, the author’s stand-in is a wandering nobleman and poet who walks the streets of Paris and tries to avoid going mad. In between those struggles, he worries that at the ripe old age of twenty eight, he has not accomplished anything. By which he means he has not written anything of note.

But then he catches himself and decides that, no, poetry should come later:

You should wait, and gather meaning and sweetness throughout a life—a long one if possible—and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people imagine, feelings (you have those early enough),—they are experiences. For the sake of a few lines you must see many cities, see many things and people, you must understand animals, you must feel how birds bird, and know the gestures with which small flowers open in the morning…

Is this self-justification for a life of wandering and travel and mooning over flowers in order to justify a few lines of verse? Absolutely.

Is he wrong? Absolutely not.