Abstract
Rilke understands the difference between Dinggedichte and the common poetry as the difference between "creating feeling" (das Gefühl bildn) and "evaluating one's own feeling" (über sein Gefühl urteiln): see "Requiem für Wolf Graf von Kalckreuth" (1908). Rilke means that the common poetry is hysterically maudlin and inconsistent.
Traditionally, the poet begins with an introspection ("How do I feel?") and then tries to project the Urteil on the world. Rilke's procedure consists in an obsessive oscillation: an introjection stems from the object into the mind, then, a projection of the mind goes to the object, and so on, until the poem, new, previously non-existent Gefühl is constructed.
By means of life-long empathic interaction with things a space emerges which is simultaneously outside and inside, called Weltinnenraum - see the famous poem "Es winkt zu Fühlung" (1914), with such strange phrases as "The birds are flying silently through us". (Normally, it would be "The birds are flying through the sky" and "An image is flying through my mind".) It is not surprising, hence, that there are authors such as Käte Hamburger or Rochelle Tobias who have found a deep similitude of Rilke's poetry with the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. On one hand, being inspired by Husserl can, it seems, draw our attention to some very interesting aspects of Rilke's work and of poetry in general.
On the other hand, however, the essential task should be to understand the poem itself, without any supporting comparisons, in its point of departure. This departure in the case of "Es winkt zu Fühlung" is: My fears can be healed by means of identification with things that have the courage or openness I lack: through a simple sympathetic gaze on them, or at a higher level, through making poems of them, i.e. by developing their significants.