New Poems

The formative work of the legendary twentieth-century poet who sought to write “not feelings but things I had felt,” featuring his poems in German and English.

When Rainer Maria Rilke first arrived in Paris in September 1902, commissioned by a German publisher to write a monograph on Rodin, he was twenty-seven and already the author of nine books of poems. As accomplished as his early work had been, it belonged tonally to the impressionistic, feeling-centered world of a late-nineteenth-century aesthetic.

Paris was to change everything. Rilke’s interest in Rodin deepened, and his enthusiasm for the sculptor’s “art of living surfaces” set the course for his own pursuit of an objective ideal. What was “new” about Rilke’s New Poems, published in two independent volumes in 1907 and 1908, was a compression of statement and a movement away from “expression” and toward “making realities.” Poems such as “The Panther” and “Archaic Torso of Apollo” are among the most successful and famous results of Rilke’s impulse.

The translations in these selections from the companion volumes have been substantially revised by award-winning translator Edward Snow.

“Rilke’s first great work. . . . [Snow’s translation] is clear, accurate, and fluent.” —Stephen Mitchell