private instruction toward passing the entrance exams for Prague’s Charles-

Ferdinand University. In 1894 his first book of verse, Leben und Lieder: Bilder und
Tagebuchblatter, was published. After a short stint at Charles-Ferdinand
University, Rilke left Prague for Munich where he mingled in the city’s literary
circles, had several of his plays produced, published his poetry collections,
Larenopfer and Traumgelkront, and was introduced to the work of Danish writer Jens
Peter Jacobsen, who was a decisive influence during Rilke’s formative years.
Visiting Venice in 1897, Rilke met Lou Andreas-Salome, a married woman fifteen
years his senior, who was also a strong influence. After spending the summer of
1897 with her in the Bavarian Alps, Rilke accompanied Salome and her husband to
Berlin in late 1897 and\\

vision with impersonal symbolism. He referred to this type of poetry as

Dinggedichte (thing poems). These verses employed a simple vocabulary to describe
concrete subjects experienced in everyday life and would lead W. H. Auden to
declare in New Republic that “Rilke’s most immediate and obvious influence has been
upon diction and imagery.” Rilke expressed ideas with “physical rather than
intellectual symbols. While Shakespeare, for example, thought of the non-human
world in terms of the human, Rilke thinks of the human in terms of the non-human,
of what he calls Things (Dinge).” Having learned the skill of perceptive
observation from Rodin and, later, from the French painter Paul Cezanne, Rilke
“sustained for a little while the ability to write without inspiration, to
transform his observations—indeed his whole life—into art,” according to Nancy
Willard, author of Testimony of the Invisible Man. The “‘thingness’ of these
poems,” explained Erich Heller in The Artist’s Journey into the Interior and Other
Essays, “reflects not the harmony in which an inner self lives with its ‘objects’;
it reflects a troubled inner self immersing itself in ‘the things.’” But although
this objective approach innovatively addressed subjects never before recognized by
other poets and created “dazzling poems,” Rilke realized, according to Willard,
that it “did not really open the secret of living things.”

By this point in his career, Rilke was reaching a crisis in his art that revealed
itself both in New Poems and his only major prose work, the novel Die
Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge).
These works express the poet’s growing doubts about whether anything existed that
was superior to mankind and his world. This, in turn,