The New Poems are also subjected to opposing interpretations. One part of scholarship saw in them a reconciling interpretation of human existence or alternatively, like Walther Rehm, pointed out their "icy splendour". "All these things, the fountains and marble wagons, the stairs to the orangery, the courtesan and the alchemist, the beggar and the saint - none profoundly knows the others. They are all non-relational - accidental and hollow, like statues or sculptures, isolated next to each other, in the artfully assembled space of this collection of poems, almost like in a museum."