The Miletus torso (c. 480–470 BC) at the Louvre has been suggested as the poem's subject. "Archaic Torso of Apollo" (German: Archaïscher Torso Apollos) is a sonnet by the Austrian writer Rainer Maria Rilke, published in the collection New Poems in 1908. It opens the collection's second part and is a companion piece to "Early Apollo", which opens the first part. The poem describes the impressions given by the surviving torso of an archaic statue, which for the poet creates a vision of what the intact statue must have been like.