The first volume, dedicated to Elisabeth and Karl von der Heydt was composed from 1902 to 1907 and was published in the same year by Insel Verlag in Leipzig.

It marks a shift from the emotive poetry of ecstatic subjectivity and interiority, which somewhat dominates his three-part The Book of Hours, to the objective language of the Dinggedicte.

With this new poetic orientation, which was influenced by the visual arts and especially Rodin, Rilke came to be considered one of the most important poets of literary modernism.

[2] The Dinglyrik ("thing-lyric") of the Parnassians through to Eduard Mörike and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer had not been oriented towards music, as in romantic poetry, but rather the visual arts.

The poems reflect Rilke's impressions of his environment, and experiences, which he sometimes confided to Lou Andreas-Salomé or Clara Westhoff in numerous letters with a great wealth of detail.

The formal nature of art and the opportunity to show with it the surface of an object, while at the same time leaving its essence to the imagination, were reflected in the two volumes of poetry.

Language, according to Rilke, offers "too-rough pliers" to tap into the soul; the word can not be "the outward sign" for "our actual life".

The ascetic thing-aspect of his verse no longer allowed the frank and open discussion of his soul, or the fine emotional and sensual states, presented clearly in The Book of Hours in the shape of prayer.

With this thing-mysticism Rilke did not however want ecstasy to overcome the clarity of consciousness, especially since he frequently made use of the sonnet form, whose caesuras are, however, glossed over by the musical language.

"[10] As he described in a brief 1919 published essay, Primal Sound, he wanted to expand the senses by means of art, to return to things their own worth, their "sheer size", and to withdraw the availability of rational purpose for the recipient.

"[4] Following research, Rilke's long-neglected collection (compared to his later works, such as the Duino Elegies or the Sonnets to Orpheus), has in the last decades arrived at a re-appraisal.

They document his ideal of the Dinggedicht, relating primarily to (external) objects, works of painting, sculpture and architecture, and to animals from the Parisian Jardin des Plantes and landscapes.