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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Famous quotes containing the word poems:
“The genuine remains of Ossian, or those ancient poems which bear his name, though of less fame and extent, are, in many respects, of the same stamp with the Iliad itself. He asserts the dignity of the bard no less than Homer, and in his era, we hear of no other priest than he.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)