''New Poems'' (german: Neue Gedichte) is a two-part collection of poems written by
Bohemian-
Austrian
Austrian may refer to:
* Austrians, someone from Austria or of Austrian descent
** Someone who is considered an Austrian citizen, see Austrian nationality law
* Austrian German dialect
* Something associated with the country Austria, for example: ...
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
Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as ...
. 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
Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...
and
Meudon
Meudon () is a municipality in the southwestern suburbs of Paris, France. It is in the département of Hauts-de-Seine. It is located from the center of Paris. The city is known for many historic monuments and some extraordinary trees. One of t ...
. At the start of each volume he placed, respectively, Früher Apollo (Early
Apollo
Apollo, grc, Ἀπόλλωνος, Apóllōnos, label=genitive , ; , grc-dor, Ἀπέλλων, Apéllōn, ; grc, Ἀπείλων, Apeílōn, label= Arcadocypriot Greek, ; grc-aeo, Ἄπλουν, Áploun, la, Apollō, la, Apollinis, label ...
) and Archaïscher Torso Apollos (Archaic Torso of Apollo), poems about sculptures of the poet-God.
These poems, many of them
sonnets
A sonnet is a poetic form that originated in the poetry composed at the Court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the Sicilian city of Palermo. The 13th-century poet and notary Giacomo da Lentini is credited with the sonnet's inventio ...
, 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 (poetic objects) themselves.
Along with ''
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
''The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge'', first published as ''Journal of My Other Self'', M. D. Herter Norton (tr.). New York: W. W. Norton, 1949, 1992. Translator's Foreword, p. 8. is a 1910 novel by Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. The nov ...
'', 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
''The Book of Hours'' (german: Das Stunden-Buch) is a collection of poetry by the Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926). The collection was written between 1899 and 1903 in three parts, and first published in Leipzi ...
'', 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
![Auguste Rodin in his Paris studio 1905](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/Auguste_Rodin_in_his_Paris_studio_1905.jpg)
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
Eduard Friedrich Mörike (8 September 18044 June 1875) was a German Lutheran pastor who was also a Romantic poet and writer of novellas and novels. Many of his poems were set to music and became established folk songs, while others were used by ...
and
Conrad Ferdinand Meyer
Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (11 October 1825 – 28 November 1898) was a Swiss poet and historical novelist, a master of literary realism who is mainly remembered for stirring narrative ballads like "Die Füße im Feuer" (The Feet in the Fire).
Biog ...
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
Paul Cézanne ( , , ; ; 19 January 1839 – 22 October 1906) was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th-century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically d ...
, at the Paris Cézanne exhibition of 1907.
Origin and Language crisis
![Rodin Gsell cygnes 10](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/Rodin_Gsell_cygnes_10.jpg)
The poems reflect Rilke's impressions of his environment, and experiences, which he sometimes confided to
Lou Andreas-Salomé
Lou Andreas-Salomé (born either Louise von Salomé or Luíza Gustavovna Salomé or Lioulia von Salomé, russian: link=no, Луиза Густавовна Саломе; 12 February 1861 – 5 February 1937) was a Russian-born psychoanalyst and a ...
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."
[Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe in zwei Bänden, Erster Band, 1896-1919, Hrsg. Horst Nalewski, Insel Verlag Frankfurt am Main und Leipzig 1991, p. 148] 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.
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."
There is nothing "uncertain for him in an object that serves him as a model... The object is definite, the art-object must be even more definite, withdrawn from all chance and removed from all ambiguity, lifted out of time and given to space, it has become permanent, capable of eternity. The model ''seems'', the art-object ''is''."
Just as Rilke had discovered landscape "as the language for his confessions" in
Worpswede
Worpswede (Northern Low Saxon: ''Worpsweed'') is a municipality in the district of Osterholz, in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is situated in the Teufelsmoor, northeast of Bremen. The small town itself is located near the Weyerberg hill. It has be ...
, and learned the "language of the hands" with Rodin, so did
Cézanne lead him into the realm of colors.
The special color perception that Rilke developed in
France
France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Its metropolitan area ...
is illustrated in his famous Blaue Hortensie (Blue
Hydrangea
''Hydrangea'', () commonly named the hortensia, is a genus of over 75 species of flowering plants native to Asia and the Americas. By far the greatest species diversity is in eastern Asia, notably China, Korea, and Japan. Most are shrubs tall, ...
) 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 much as he admired Hofmannsthal, Rilke also distinguished between a poetic and metaphorical language of things and a language conceived abstractedly and rationally.
Special features
The New Poems show Rilke's great sensitivity to the world of representational reality. The ascetic thing-aspect of his verse no longer allowed the frank and open discussion of his soul, or the fine emotional and sensual states, presented clearly in
The Book of Hours
''The Book of Hours'' (german: Das Stunden-Buch) is a collection of poetry by the Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926). The collection was written between 1899 and 1903 in three parts, and first published in Leipzi ...
in the shape of prayer.
The poems tend to be stylistically descriptive at the starting point, but the boundary between observer and object soon dissolves via observation and elicits new connections. With this thing-mysticism Rilke did not however want ecstasy to overcome the clarity of consciousness, especially since he frequently made use of the sonnet form, whose caesuras are, however, glossed over by the musical language.
Gero von Wilpert
Gero von Wilpert (13 March 1933 – 24 December 2009) was a German author, a senior lecturer in German at the University of New South Wales and, from 1980, Professor of German at the University of Sydney.
Life and career
Wilpert was born in Ta ...
, Lexikon der Weltliteratur, Neue Gedichte, Alfred Kröner Verlag, p. 959 In contrast to
Eduard Mörike
Eduard Friedrich Mörike (8 September 18044 June 1875) was a German Lutheran pastor who was also a Romantic poet and writer of novellas and novels. Many of his poems were set to music and became established folk songs, while others were used by ...
and
Conrad Ferdinand Meyer
Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (11 October 1825 – 28 November 1898) was a Swiss poet and historical novelist, a master of literary realism who is mainly remembered for stirring narrative ballads like "Die Füße im Feuer" (The Feet in the Fire).
Biog ...
- whose Roman fountain is paradigmatic - Rilke wanted objects to not merely describe or objectify moods; the thing should rather be charged, as it were, with a special meaning and thus be released from conventional references to space and time. This is confirmed by the lines of the unrhymed poem The Rose Bowl, which completes the first part: "And the movement in the roses, see: / gestures from such small vibrations, / that they would remain invisible, if their / Rays did not diverge into the universe."
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."
Interpretation and reception
![Torso Miletus Louvre Ma2792](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Torso_Miletus_Louvre_Ma2792.jpg)
Following research, Rilke's long-neglected collection (compared to his later works, such as the ''
Duino Elegies
The ''Duino Elegies'' (german: Duineser Elegien) are a collection of ten elegies written by the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. He was then "widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets", and began t ...
'' or the ''
Sonnets to Orpheus
The ''Sonnets to Orpheus'' (german: Die Sonette an Orpheus) are a cycle of 55 sonnets written in 1922 by the Bohemian- Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926). It was first published the following year. Rilke, who is "widely recognized ...
''), has in the last decades arrived at a re-appraisal. Within his oeuvre, the New Poems were now regarded as his most important contribution to modern literature and were most intensively received. They document his ideal of the ''Dinggedicht'', relating primarily to (external) objects, works of painting, sculpture and architecture, and to animals from the Parisian
Jardin des Plantes and landscapes.
In poems such as "
The Panther", his most famous work, or "Archaic Torso of Apollo", Rilke approaches this sort of ideal clearly. In this sonnet he converts the object of observation into a transcendent symbol, the observing subject and seeing object embrace:
although the torso is missing its head, the entire statue glows from within, beaming towards the observer like a star and leading to an epiphanic experience: "For there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life."
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."
Since Rilke attended not to the objects as such, but to their representation, it was natural to interpret his poetry phenomenologically. Kate Hamburger indicated such a connection to the philosophy of
Edmund Husserl
, thesis1_title = Beiträge zur Variationsrechnung (Contributions to the Calculus of Variations)
, thesis1_url = https://fedora.phaidra.univie.ac.at/fedora/get/o:58535/bdef:Book/view
, thesis1_year = 1883
, thesis2_title ...
, who himself dealt with this question with his 'Thing and Space' lecture of 1907.
References
Bibliography
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{{Authority control
1907 books
Austro-Hungarian culture
Poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke
Poetry collections