THE PROJECT OF CULTIVATING a special kind of looking (“Schauen”) engaged Rainer Maria Rilke from approximately 1900 until 1914. The initial poem in Das Buch der Bilder (The Book of Images), “Eingang” (“Entrance,” 1900), encourages the reader, “whoever you might be,” to create the world afresh “with your eyes.” The poem “Wendung” (“Turning Point,” 20 June 1914) explicitly documents Rilke's turn from “Schauen” (looking) to “Herz-Werk” (heart work). This poem, which begins, “Lange errang ers im Anschaun” (For a long time he won it through looking), ends with the stanzas:

[For see, there's a limit to looking. And the more looked-upon world wants to prosper in love. The work of vision is done. Now do heart work on the pictures inside you, the trapped ones. For you overpowered them; but now you do not know them. See, inner man, your inner girl, won from a thousand natures, this creature only just won, as yet never loved.]

Here Rilke sets up antitheses: “Anschaun” (looking) vs. “Liebe” (love) that, moreover, are gendered. In suggesting that for the “inner man,” learning “Herz-Werk” is bound up with acquiring and loving one's “inner girl,” he picks up on an idea he develops at much greater length in his autobiographical novel Die Aufzeichungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 1910). In Malte, Rilke's first-person narrator proposes that women have historically been the great heroic lovers, having cultivated and perfected an art of love that in men has largely remained undeveloped potential. Specifically, women have shown themselves capable of unrequited love—or “intransitive love” as it has come to be known in Malte criticism. To Malte, this history testifies not to their victimhood but to their strength.