New Poems (German: Neue Gedichte) 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.
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“Some poems are for holidays only. They are polished and sweet, but it is the sweetness of sugar, and not such as toil gives to sour bread. The breath with which the poet utters his verse must be that by which he lives.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)