According to Rilke, what is the role of criticism in art work?

Rilke advised Franz Kappus, the young poet to whom he wrote his Letters to a Young Poet, to avoid reading criticism. Rilke also himself avoided offering Kappus criticism. Instead, he wanted Kappus to develop his own inner literary sensibility, telling him in the first letter that nobody can help him. Instead Rilke tells him the following:

There is only one way—Go into yourself.

Rilke also advises Kappus not to seek rational answers to his questions about art yet, but instead to live life fully and to have faith that through living itself the answers will come. Over and over, he urges his young correspondent to look inside his soul and try to understand what causes him to want to write poetry. The answers are within, not without, and have more to do with feelings than intellectual thought (though thought helps, too). Discover how deep your desire to write has gone, he tells Kappus:

see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write

After seeing and experiencing, the work of art is the work of the heart, the emotions:

The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.

Rilke, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, places the way of learning to discern, which is the object of criticism, inside the heart of an individual. For that reason, he sees little need for listening to what others have to say until one knows oneself.