New Poems

A century and a half after his birth, Rainer Maria Rilke remains woven into English-speaking culture in ways unexpected for a difficult modern poet, and especially one writing in German. Many readers will know individual titles from the two volumes of New Poems ( Neue Gedichte), presented here in full. But the vast majority of these poems are little known in the English-speaking world. In John Greening’s fresh, lively translation, the tidal pull of Rilke’s internal music and astonishing imagery comes to the surface alongside the poems’ elaborate rhyme and meter.

Although Rilke’s poems are often described as Dinggedichte—thing-poems—that term is more useful in helping us see the poems themselves as individual artifacts, which in turn conveys something of Rilke’s style. What may be surprising to those who assume that poets write solely on inspiration is the business-like way Rilke set up a production line for the New Poems, starting with a list of a hundred or so topics and crossing them off as he went.

These poems look both inward and outward, and their variety is considerable—there are tour-de-force works as well as simple, quietly affective pieces. Rilke makes formal and thematic connections across a spectrum of tone and tempo. As Greening claims, these disparate pieces coalesce to reveal something we didn’t know we were waiting to find.