New Poems () is a two-part collection of poems written by Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926). 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 (New Poems: The Other Part), 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 (Early Apollo) and Archaïscher Torso Apollos (Archaic Torso of Apollo), 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 (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 (poetic objects) themselves.
Along with The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, the collection is considered to be the main work of his middle period, which clearly stands out from the work preceding and following it. It marks a shift from the emotive poetry of ecstatic subjectivity and interiority, which somewhat dominates his three-part The Book of Hours, to the objective language of the Dinggedicte. With this new poetic orientation, which was influenced by the visual arts and especially Rodin, Rilke came to be considered one of the most important poets of literary modernism.
Background
thumb|Rodin in the studio, 1905
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.
Origin and Language crisis
thumb|Rodin at Meudon, where Rilke worked as secretary
The poems reflect Rilke's impressions of his environment, and experiences, which he sometimes confided to Lou Andreas-Salomé or Clara Westhoff in numerous letters with a great wealth of detail. They also describe his own influences in the objects of reality-oriented art. The poems also stand at the end of a long development process: A year after he completed the monograph on Rodin, he told Lou Andreas-Salomé how desperately he was looking for a craft-like foundation for his art, a tool that would give his art the necessary solidity. He excluded two possibilities: The new craft should not be the craft of language itself, but rather an attempt "to find a better understanding of inner life". Likewise, the humanistic way of education that Hugo von Hofmannsthal had undertaken, the foundation "to seek a well-inherited and increasing culture" did not appeal to him. The poetic craft should rather be seeing itself, the ability to "see better, to look with more patience, with more immersion."
Rilke was fascinated by both artisanal precision and concentration on the subject, a way of working which he observed frequently with Rodin. The formal nature of art and the opportunity to show with it the surface of an object, while at the same time leaving its essence to the imagination, were reflected in the two volumes of poetry.
He described Rodin to Lou Andreas-Salomé as a lonely old man, "sunk in himself, standing full of sap like an old tree in autumn." Rodin had given his heart "a depth, and its beat comes from afar as though from a mountain center." For Rilke, Rodin's real discovery was the liberation of surfaces, as well as the seemingly unintentional fashioning of the sculpture from the thus liberated forms. He described how Rodin did not follow a principal concept, but masterfully designed the smallest elements, in accordance with their own development.
thumb|[[Paul Cézanne's The Bathers. Rilke saw this painting at the Paris retrospective of 1907]]
While Rodin closed himself to what is unimportant, he was open to reality, where "animals and people... touch him like things". Like a continually receptive lover, nothing escapes him, and as a craftsman he has a concentrated "way of looking." The special color perception that Rilke developed in France is illustrated in his famous Blaue Hortensie (Blue Hydrangea) sonnet, in which he shows, in an almost detached fashion, the interplay of the appearance of lively colors.
Rilke's turn to the visual is evidence of a low confidence in language and is related to the language crisis of modernity, as exemplified by Hofmannsthal's Chandos letter, in which he addresses the reasons for a profound skepticism about language. Language, according to Rilke, offers "too-rough pliers" to tap into the soul; the word can not be "the outward sign" for "our actual life".
As he described in a brief 1919 published essay, Primal Sound, he wanted to expand the senses by means of art, to return to things their own worth, their "sheer size", and to withdraw the availability of rational purpose for the recipient. He believed in a higher total context of all beings, attainable only through art, which transcends the world: the "perfect poem" could "arise only under the condition that the world, acted upon by five levers simultaneously, appears, under a certain aspect on the supernatural plane, which is precisely the plane of the poem."
The New Poems are also subjected to opposing interpretations. One part of scholarship saw in them a reconciling interpretation of human existence or alternatively, like Walther Rehm, pointed out their "icy splendour". "All these things, the fountains and marble wagons, the stairs to the orangery, the courtesan and the alchemist, the beggar and the saint – none profoundly knows the others. They are all non-relational – accidental and hollow, like statues or sculptures, isolated next to each other, in the artfully assembled space of this collection of poems, almost like in a museum."