New poems

"New Poems" is a collection of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. He began collecting the poems in 1906, published "New Poems" in 1907, and in the following year published a second volume of additional poems. 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 (poetic objects) themselves.