Along with "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge", the collection is considered to be the main work of his middle period, which clearly stands out from the work preceding and following it. 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.