| Sumario: | The tension between referentiality and hermeticism inherent in Rilke's Neue Gedichte has produced a divide in the critical literature, where either one pole or the other tends to be privileged. Studies of the relationship between Neue Gedichte and space either read the poems biographically in relation to real places, or concentrate on the classic Dinggedichte, showing how these transform objects into self-contained patterns of motion. This article argues instead that the references to places in Neue Gedichte reinforce the ambivalence between referentiality and hermeticism. Close comparative readings of three poems which are neither obvious examples of the Dinggedicht nor exercises in visual perception or ‘sachliches Sagen’–‘Der Turm’, ‘Venezianischer Morgen’ and ‘Spätherbst in Venedig’– demonstrate Rilke's concern with the relationship between real space and aesthetic space, and with the nature of poetic ‘space’, given the temporal nature of language. It is shown how the poems both give space a temporal dimension and transform temporal processes into aesthetic space. Beyond Rilke's own concern with learning more productive ways of seeing, vision plays an important aesthetic role in making it possible to convey space as a temporal process.
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