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As we know, Rilke, under the influence of Auguste Rodin, whom he had assisted between 1905 and 1906 in Meudon as a private secretary, turned away from the art nouveau-like, sensitized-atmospheric poetic approach of his early years to pursue a view of art determined more strongly by the priority of the object. The proto-modern pathos of making way for the object without depicting it in a manner ‘true to nature’, like that of the old masters, led in Rilke’s case to the concept of the thing-poem – and thus to a temporarily convincing new answer to the question of the source of aesthetic and ethical authority. From that point, it would be the things themselves from which all authority would come – or rather: from this respectively current singular thing that turns to me by demanding my full gaze. This is only possible because thing-being would now no longer mean anything but this: having something to say.
