page_title: New Poems
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: New Poems / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) in his Paris studio in 1905. Photograph by Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864-1952).
context_page_description: New Poems is a two-part collection of poems written by Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke. The first volume, dedicated to Elisabeth and Karl von der Heydt was composed from 1902 to 1907 and was published in the same year by Insel Verlag in Leipzig. The second volume, dedicated to Auguste Rodin, was completed in 1908 and published by the same publisher. With the exception of eight poems written in Capri, Rilke composed most of them in Paris and Meudon. At the start of each volume he placed, respectively, Früher Apollo and Archaïscher Torso Apollos, poems about sculptures of the poet-God.
  These poems, many of them sonnets, are often intensely focused on the visual. They show Rilke aware of the objective world and of the people amongst whom he lives. The poems are astonishingly concentrated: both short, and compacting a profundity of experience into small compass. He called them Dinggedichte, which translated literally means "Thing-Poems," intending to reveal both that the poems were about "things" and that the poems had become, so concentrated and whole in themselves were they, things themselves.
context_section_description: Because the collection lacks a cohesive meaning as well as an overarching central concept, it is no cycle of poems in the strict sense. On the other hand, it cannot be concluded to be an arbitrary compilation, because despite the great diversity of forms and genres, everything is permeated by a coherent formal principle - the 'thing' aspect of lyrical speech, which is bound to the experience of observed reality.
  The Dinglyrik ("thing-lyric") of the Parnassians through to Eduard Mörike and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer had not been oriented towards music, as in romantic poetry, but rather the visual arts. This point of reference is also noticeable in Rilke's poems. Firstly in the towering figure of the sculptor Auguste Rodin, (who Rilke wrote a monograph about while acting as his private secretary), and later in Rilke's encounter with the work of Paul Cézanne, at the Paris Cézanne exhibition of 1907.
caption: Rodin in the studio, 1905
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