Vestdijkkroniek. Jaargang 1976

Gentleman of sadness, Simon Vestdijk as poet
E.M. Beekman

Part One - Theory of Poetry

Vestdijk's work is a Dichtung. Despite differences in manner it was fed by the same impulse. This prodigious verbal empire is ruled by lyricism and the intellect not in isolation but in tandem, aiming at mutual benefaction. The basic dichotomy of Occidental striving achieves a modus vivendi in Vestdijk's work that is fluid and serene, a practice which embraces opposites in a verbal crystallization.

The lyrical impulse gave birth to his career. In 1932 Vestdijk published his first book, a collection of poems (Verzen), and an essay on Emily Dickenson who, at that time, was virtually unknown in Europe. The essay is not only the germ for the full flowering of his later poetics but also a grammar of his main concerns. The latter can, at this point, only be declined as the prelude to an examination of his entire work.

For instance, Vestdijk praises her poetry as a concretization of the abstract, when a thought is not illustrated by proxy but directly figured.^1. Dickenson allows no division between mental and natural objects: the life of the mind is as vivid as that or our emotions or as the flight of a bird. Vestdijk also keenly perceives the quality of pain in Dickenson's verse: her bafflement at the incommensurability of existence, the inconstancy that allows no permanence either in time or feeling.^2. Nor does he fail to note its consequence: a tension of opposites that fuels a dynamism of thesis/antithesis without ever stilling into synthesis. For a synthesis concludes a solution that might easily surrender a preferential treatment of a dilemma which honesty refuses to achieve. Hence Vestdijk understands her interest in the authenticity of man and the pessimism of her conclusions. These conclusions he summarized in Dickenson's perception of love - ‘the stronger the love the more relentless loneliness’^3. - extending it to mean her central preoccupation: an awareness of the ‘desolation of everything that lives individually.’^4.

Not only are these penetrating observations about the work of the American

1. ‘Over de dichteres Emily Dickenson’, in Lier en Lancet, I ('s-Gravenhage-Rotterdam: Nijgh en van Ditmar, 1960), p.20

2. Lier en Lancet, I, p. 34 ff.

3. Lier en Lancet, I, p. 46.

4. Lier en Lancet, I, p.47.

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poet who was a terra incognita^5., but one can also see Vestdijk the reader discovering affinities for Vestdijk the artist - a philosophical congruence that was deliberately elected. For a great writer who works in several modes of literary expression chooses subjects with deliberation. The very act of choice is a confession. And in a writer such as Vestdijk, for whom the act of creation is never far from the act of thought, theoretical concerns betray obsession. Vestdijk's major essays on authors such as Dickenson, Valéry, Rilke, Joyce, Kafka and Proust (not to mention Dutch authors) are superb critical ‘readings’, yet they are also explications of his own craft and we can profit from such interdependence. In the final analysis, the oeuvre of a great author can be read as a palindrome^6..

5. One needs to emphasize this, for there are critics who will not allow Vestdijk his due. For instance see the specious grumbling of J.P. Guépin, ‘Met de lier, niet met het lancet’, in In een moeilijke houding geschreven opstellen (Den Haag: Bert Bakker/-Daamen N.V., 1969), pp. 81-88. For that matter E. Du Perron, a contemporary of Vestdijk, agrees with the argument that the American poet was for all intents and purposes unknown at the time. E. Du Perron, ‘Over S. Vestdijk’, in Verzameld Werk (Amsterdam: G.A. van Oorschot, 1958), VI, p. 17 Richard B. Sewall, author of the recent mammoth biography of Dickenson, notes in his introduction to a collection of essays on the poet, that the first responsible edition of her work came 69 years after her death (1955) and that the main surge of interest in her work dates from the Fifties. It is true that there were, as always, prescient souls, notably Conrad Aiken who published a major assessment in 1924. But this hardly constitutes a firm reputation, not even in her own country, and certainly not abroad, Richard B. Sewall, ‘Introduction’, in Emily Dickenson. A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Richard B. Sewall (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp. 1-8.

6. Du Perron makes just such a claim but only for the Dickenson essay. ‘Over S. Vestdijk’, in Verzameld Werk (Amsterdam: G.A. van Oorschot, 1958), VI, p.17.

Intentional-dynamic Poetry

The essay on Emily Dickenson also marks the beginning of Vestdijk's attempt to formulate his perceptions of that perennial problem of literary criticism: form and content. Over a period of ten years (roughly from 1932 to 1943) he stated and restated his case.

In order to justify his claims for Dickenson's greatness (as compared to the more popular Whitman or Poe), Vestdijk delineates a type of poetry that he calls ‘intentional poetry’. This is a kind of verse where the emphasis is on ‘original vision and conception’, on content rather than form, although Vestdijk immediately admits that one cannot maintain a strictly empirical division^7.. The dilemma makes him write rather aggresively, but not precisely, about what constitutes qualifications for a new mode.

Form and content are to be distinguished but cannot be separated, for if one does, one is speaking about something else but no longer about poetry. Yet Dickenson's poetry was so markedly different from what was practiced in his day, that Vestdijk had to defend her originality and could only do so by contrasting it to the prevalent mode of ‘sound verse’ which relied primarily on sonority, and which was content to abide in its perfection of formal completion.^8.

Intentional poetry, in contrast, is dynamic, never finished, is a writing where one can see the ‘poetic intention’ in the act of realization, which one ‘so to speak, has to catch in flight’^9.. It seems to me that Vestdijk is voicing a dislike for a poetry that is overbearing in its static completion: it can only be what it is and brooks no apprehension in its meaning and no subtlety in its formulation. On the one hand we have ‘crystallized’ works of art, while Dickenson's poems are still in the process of ‘crystallization’; with the former we are in a ‘museum’, while with the latter we are a visitor to the artist's ‘studio’; sound verse gives us a view through a telescope of ‘magnificent, quietly waving landscapes’ while in Emily Dickenson's intentional poetry we look through a microscope ‘at cells which are busy (sic)^10..

In 1934 Vestdijk attempted a rationalization for the contemporary tendency to reinvent quotidian speech as a poetic medium.’^11. He thought it was partially the result of language's recalcitrance: one can rarify it only so far in terms of rhetoric before it will draw back upon its source of everyday speech. This stubborn quality of language is due to the fact that is has, when still a basic

7. ‘Over de dichteres Emily Dickenson’, in, Lier en Lancet, I, p. 14 and p.49.

8. Lier en Lancet, I, pp. 13-14.

9. Lier en Lancet, I, p.15.

10. Lier en Lancet, I, p.15.

11. ‘Over de dichter J. Greshoff’, in Lier en Lancet, I, pp. 142-157.

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material, an ‘autonomous structure’: inherent structures that do not allow a limitless reshaping^12.. Although Vestdijk is no overlay transparent here - for he had a knack for sounding most imperial (an illusion aided by a fortiori prepositions such as ‘after all, nevertheless, indeed’) when least precise - this seems to suggest what Chomsky would later discuss as syntactic structures which cannot be violated^13.. Language, therefore, would already appear to have a kind of form, hence Vestdijk can now redefine the formal question as a ‘battle of form and material [i.e. language]’ or one ‘between form and form’.

Three years after his pioneering essay, Vestdijk appears to be contradicting his impassionate defense of Dickenson's ‘intentional verse’ by asserting that prose is much more liable to have the characteristics of being ‘inspired [or] in flux’ than poetry: ‘Poetry determines once and for all, prose knows constant additions, is never clearly delineated, although in and by itself it delineates exactly.’^14. So he can speak of a poet's work which exhibits ‘forms with an internal flow of emotion [and] fantasies within a strict framing [sic]’^15. - a formulation which insists on the indicative if not restrictive nature of poetry.

These contradictory preambles are resolved in several major essays, particularly in the forbiddingly entitled ‘Prolegomena to an Esthetic Theory’, written in 1935 and revised over a period of five years. Two supportive texts, which appeared in subsequent years, continued Vestdijk's debate with a problem that kept on nagging him because, as will be indicated later on, it had much larger ramifications for him. Due to the complexities of the problem one can be thankful that the most important essay remained ‘an introduction’, since the highly speculative nature of the thought and the density of the writing would have produced a most esoteric and forbidding work^16..

First Vestdijk asserts that the problem of form and substance is merely indicative of the basic polarity that forms the foundation for speculative thought. This is true, to be sure, though somewhat reticent, for it is a reiteration of the basic dichotomy that underpins Western philosophy, literature and religious systems. As far as his own work is concerned, it is a theoretical foreboding of one of his major concerns, one discovered already in Emily Dickenson's poetry, and which he embodied in his own work in a series of variations which increase in subtlety from reality to the ideal. In fact, what we have here is a genus which comprehends a host of species. And it may be noted that Vestdijk inevitably comes to list them: the general vs the particular, ideals vs personal relationships, intuition vs analytical thought, the female vs the male character, intellect vs the soul.

Returning to poetry, Vestdijk makes the following distinctions. There is the polarity: form/content, and the polarity: form/substance. Substance is different according to our perception of it either as content (i.e. formed substance) or as unformed substance (what is the basic language material). This enables him to bypass the qualitative problem that has so bedevilled theoreticians of literature: whether there is, so to speak, an endosmotic or an exosmotic movement between the two principles. Because now we have two different sets. Substance is the collection of words called language, a material that has inevitably a Form, as does everything similar to it. The second is form and content in terms of a specific assemblage - a construction that could not exist previous to this partic-

12. Lier en Lancet, I, p.142.

13. Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (The Hague: Mouton, 1957), pp. 106-108. Compare a fascinating essay by a most pertinent linguist: Roman Jakobson, ‘Verbal Communication’, Scientific American, 227, no. 3 (september 1972), pp. 72-80.

14. ‘Jacobus Tarquinius Superbus in zijn poëzie’, in Muiterij tegen het etmaal (Den Haag: Bert Bakker-Daamen N.V., 1966), II, p.16.

15. Muiterij tegen het etmaal, II, p.17.

16. Later in life Vestdijk made light of this period when he had a rage to systematize. Cf. an early self-awareness in Lier en Lancet, I, p. 83.

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ular instance. To put this in terms of an image: a minted coin would have gold as its Substance and its circularity as Form, while the raised profile of a leader's face would be the specific form and the fact that it represents Washington would indicate its content. Thus Vestdijk arrives at a, more or less, schematic representation of what he previously so baldly asserted as a ‘battle of form and substance’ or one ‘between form and form’. For as he can state now, form and content are not identical but correlative, and can be traced as mobile variations of the constants of language (Substance) and its inevitable formulation (Form) previously alluded to as the ‘autonomous structure’ of language.

It is this very motility of form & content across Form & Substance that has resulted in the illusion of their identity. Perhaps we can only go so far as to say that they vary in unison in the manner of, as Vestdijk remarks, ‘climate and vegetation which, however, are therefore not necessarily identical.^17. He illustrates his assertion with the case of imagery. A poem's imagery can be seen as Form from the point of view of a thought development - i.e. the manner in which the substance of that thought is embodied in that imagery - but it can also be seen as content from the point of view of the diction and syntax which expresses the image.^18. Or, to refer back to our comparison, from the point of view of wanting to commemorate Washington as a leader, the profile would be the Form and the gold the content. But one could also defend the interpretation that the gold was Form (i.e. a precious metal fit for a king) and the coin the content (by virtue of the necessities of minting). One can appreciate the fact that the variations are prodigious snd that the motility of these two sets can effect extreme subtleties. The practical application can be studied in Vestdijk's numberous ‘reviews’ of works of poetry.^19.

During the time when the ‘Prolegomena’ was being written, Vestdijk published a more congenial explication of his thesis without the ‘scholastic algebra’ we have just tried to decipher. The occasion was the need to explain his singular definition of that troublesome term ‘Baroque’ (usually an epochal one) in order to fit his interpretation of his favorite poet, Rilke^20.. Vestdijk humbly called his efforts ‘propaedeutical’, as indeed all his critial or scholarly efforts were. One may add, parenthetically, that preliminary instruction of this caliber is not often rivalled by more hubristic efforts of paedeutics. The humility is, furthermore, somewhat disingenuous. For it would seem to me that in this instance, for example, Vestdijk noticed that this interpretation of Rilke was indiosyncratic, that it would therefore benefit from a conceptual skeleton to shape the meat of his argument which, in its turns, was discovered in his particular conception of the term ‘Baroque’ which, in order to be argued convincingly, needed the sinews of his resolution of the form/content problem to set it in motion. Perhaps we might assume that the critical sequence was: reflection on the form/content dichotomy gave substance to his definition of ‘Baroque’, which was then used as an illustrative model to illuminate Rilke's poetry^21. This is often the case with his major essays and might give some idea of the complexity of his critical writings.

Students of literature and the arts know the curiously equivocal nature of Baroque art. It lacks the specificity of Classical art, yet it has a predilection for rigorous form (if not excessively so) which Romantic art lacks. With the help of

17. ‘Prolegomena ener esthetiek’, in De Poolse ruiter (Den Haag: Bert Bakker-Daamen N.V., 1963), p.222.

18. Poolse Ruiter, p.223.

19. The journalistic term ‘review’ needs to be qualified here since in Vestdijk's practice, it barely resembles our well-known garden variety. These byzantine texts were often thought too complicated by the fifth estate, since they never resembled the ephemeral notations of literary products we are so familiar with. Compare: Th. Govaart, Simon Vestdijk (Desclée de Brouwer, 1960), p.12. From a host of examples a selection can be studied in the collections Muiterij tegen het etmaal (Den Haag: Bert Bakker/Daamen N.V., 1966), 2 vols. and Voor en na de explosie (Den Haag: Bert Bakker-Daamen N.V., 1960).

20. ‘Prolegomena ener esthetiek’ was started in 1935, while ‘Rilke als barokkunstenaar’ was written from 1937 to 1938. Vestdijk's own dating differs from the (up till now) official bibliography Vestdijk in kaart, ed. Daisy Wolthers (Bert Bakker-Daamen N.V., 1967). There is no doubt in my mind that ‘Prolegomena’ was started first, then the ‘Rilke’ essay written, and that the final section of ‘Prolegomena’ was added later (hence the latter's dating by Vestdijk as 1935-1940) since it contains reference to the ‘Rilke’ essay; cf. De poolse ruiter, pp. 228-30.

21. The same might well apply to the following concepts and the poets they illustrate: ‘Byzantisme’ and Nijhoff, and the ‘Apollonian’ and Marsman in De Poolse Ruiter (Den Haag: Bert Bakker-Daamen N.V., 1963), pp. 152-183 and 184-210; the poetry of ideality in Albert Verwey en de Idee (Amsterdam: Polak & Van Gennep, 1965); or the organic structure of poetry in De glanzende kiemcel (Amsterdam: De Driehoek, 1956). See also a similar notation in J.J. Oversteegen, Vorm of Vent. Opvattingen over de aard van het literaire werk in de Nederlandse kritiek tussen de twee wereldoorlogen (Amsterdam: Athenaeum-Polak & Van Gennep, 1970), pp. 451-454.

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his theory of the double set of form/content and Form/Substance, Vestdijk feels confident that he can define the characteristics of this genre, because ‘the problem of Baroque is fundamentally a problem of form’. ‘In short, my theory of form pertains to... the fact that I distinguish two notions of “form” which relate in a contradictory fashion to both “content” and “substance” in such a manner, that the first notion is related to the formal characteristics which one can discern in every work of art - the “outside” of the work of art as it were - and the second to its formation, its correctness, its harmony, its regularity.’^22.

Here we have the principle of motility again, because we can have a work of art with its content ‘formless’ but its Form ‘formed’. This is the case with Baroque. Although such schemes do not explain everything, ‘particularly not concrete details’ as Vestdijk warns, one may present the following definitions. In Classic art, Form and content are both formed; in Baroque art, Form is formed but content is formless; in Romantic art both are formless.^23. Hence, as Vestdijk asserts, Baroque is not a decadent Classicims or an earlier form of Romanticism, nor a mixture of both - judgements based on whether it is viewed from the perspective of either form or content - but an ‘autonomous form of art’.

There is a peculiar urgency to his pleading. A superficial acquaintance with his work would support the hasty conclusion that this is a mind who would champion orderliness and measure equilibrium. But when one examines his work more carefully there is, along with the almost scholastic organizing, a concurrent refusal to finalize, a flouting of solutions, an almost sorrowful apprehension of fragility. This can be discovered even in his theoretical writings, for example in the notion of motility which we have just discovered, or even in the schema printed in ‘Prolegomena’ which discloses diffusion rather than specificity.^24. Indeed, it may be found in the very composition of his style. Although it may prove to be the distinguishing feature of Vestdijk's work, it can only be disclosed by accretion, while any examination of it will, perforce, have to face inherent contradictions. At this point it may be summarized metaphorically: that great codifier Linnaeus gave his name not only to a botanical index but also to a slender evergreen (Linnaea borealis) which flowers even in frigid zones. In terms of the Rilke essay, the correlative for our inference is Vestdijk's insistence on the autonomy of the Baroque as a defense of the improvisatory nature of art, its relish for the inchoate. It might be useful, writes Vestdijk, to note, for once, that ‘for artistic creation in general, it is not the equilibrium of form and content, of ideal and human kind that is characteristic, but rather a profound unsettling of it...’^25. The latter would be consistent with his refusal to allow an identification of form and content. With this in mind, Vestdijk proceeds to give a practical application of his theory.

The most distinctive feature of Rilke's poetry is motion. In and by itself there is little remarkable in that for one can find it as a topos in a great deal of poetry (here we have the Form of content). But in Rilke we will find two contradictory movements which happen simultaneously (within the content), a feature which shapes dynamic verse in a technical sense, for instance run-on lines (the Form of form). Antithetical movement is not enough however (we now have content as F²), for what is really the specific nature of it, is the transitional stage from one to the other - i.e. Verwandlung (content as F3). This progeny of distinctions is

22. ‘Rilke als barokkunstenaar’, in Lier en Lancet, I, p.83.

23. It is difficult to agree with his denunciation of Romanticism. For one thing a case could be made for considering all poetry primarily Romantic in mode with Classicism (more aptly termed Neo-Classicism) as a temporary aberration. Be that as it may, the technical mastery of Goethe, Byron or Hugo would not be witness for his defense.

24. Poolse Ruiter, p. 225.

25. ‘Rilke als barokkunstenaar’, in Lier en Lancet, I, p.98.

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augmented at every step and a quasi algebraic notation would only hinder and stultify critical perceptions. For Vestdijk's insight is truly impressive. But it does show that, with the theoretical scaffolding to guide him, Vestdijk could (almost literally) unfold an interpretation that strikes one as practically organic. He applies the same procedure to Rilke's imagery, again stressing the dynamic usage of metaphor and the contradictory phenomenon of ‘particularizing the general’ and ‘generalizing the particular’.^26. Under the latter category Vestdijk illustrates with specific quotations Rilke's penchant for ‘concretizing abstract principles’, something which he isolated before in his essay on Emily Dickenson.

We hopefully arrived at a point where otherwise cryptic judgments have become more revealing. A test might be provided by a review wherein Vestdijk complains that a certain poet lacks form while insisting that his verse are metrically quite correct. What he is objecting to is the abscence of a ‘forceful plasticity’, that is to say, the articulation of language and imagery in terms of form in relation to content.^27.

26. Lier en Lancet, pp. 109-115.

27. ‘De dansende lamp en het rustende brandglas’, in Muiterij tegen het etmaal (Den Haag: Bert Bakker-Daamen N.V., 1966), p.55. This review was written in the same year as the inception of ‘Prolegomena’.

Significative Poetry

In the 1932 essay on Emily Dickenson, Vestdijk distinguished two types of poetry. One was the prevalent mode of what he called ‘sound verse’, a kind of poetry which relies primarily on external form and which basks content in its completion. The other major type, and the one Vestdijk championed, was ‘intentional poetry’ which achieves its importance from the act of conceptualising its thought. It is particularly noteworthy for not allowing a stasis of technical perfection; it prefers to be in a state of preoccupation with the idea it strives to formulate.^28.

In 1936 Vestdijk redefines these categories as ‘musical poetry’ and ‘significative poetry’, the latter being ‘a-musical’.^29. ‘Musical poetry’ corresponds to ‘sound verse’ since both are created from the sonorous qualities of language: ‘syntax and meter are subordinate to “musical rhythm”.’^30. In musical verse words ‘melt into their meanings’ and form an associative aura that is suggestive rather than explicit.^31. As the term implies, ‘significative verse’ scans meaning; the words are, more or less, precise in what they demarcate. Even though this poetry can employ all the technical expertise of musical verse, content is always paramount and it will subordinate aural seduction.^32.

In 1943 Vestdijk gave a series of lectures on poetry to his fellow inmates in St. Michielsgestel. Along with a number of prominent Dutch citizens, Vestdijk had been incarcerated as a hostage by the Germans in order to serve as a victim of reprisal whenever resistance to their oppression provoked the enemy.^33. Published in 1950 under the title The Shining Germ Cell (De glanzende kiemcel). these eight lectures form Vestdijk's most lucid exposition of his poetics. Besides expected disquisitions on prosody (lectures II through IV) and a unique tour complete with slides, as it were, of the laboratory of the poet (lecture VIII), we can also reacquaint ourselves with his more cherished preoccupations. But given his motley audience of prominent but quite sober citizens, one may well wonder how profitable it was when Vestdijk substituted the term musische poetry for what was formerly significative poetry? It was a regressive improvement, to say

28. Lier en Lancet, I, pp. 13-15.

29. ‘Muzikale en significatieve poëzie’, in Muiterij tegen het etmaal, II, p. 50. ‘Muzikale poëzie’ was already mentioned in ‘Over de dichteres Emily Dickenson’, in Lier en Lancet, I, p.14.

30. Muiterij, II, p.50.

31. Muiterij, II, p.52.

32. One must again note the constant interweaving of Vestdijk's texts. His illustrative example for ‘musical poetry’ is Jan Engelman's poem ‘Vera Janacopoulos’ mentioned on p. 51 of Muiterij, II. It reoccurs to perform the same function in De glanzende kiemcel (Amsterdam: De Driehoek, 1956), pp. 125-129. On p. 52 in Muiterij, II, Vestdijk notes the correspondence of his types with Wölfflin's linear and malerisch concepts (i.e. significative and musical, respectively), a similarity he had already noted in his essay ‘Rilke als barokkunstenaar’ in Lier en Lancet I, p.89.

33. A personal account can be found in Gestalten tegenover mij (Den Haag: Bert Bakker-Daamen N.V., 1961), pp. 189-203.

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the least.

There is, he says, a poetry that is musical but which does not rely on sound for its effect. This paradoxical type is defined as a poetry which ‘evokes emotions’ by means ‘of the meaning of words and not by their sound’. This is the musische poetry wherein the musicality of the verse is borne solely by content: ‘the content seeks from within itself - with its own means, without appealing to sound - a connection with music, a connection with the great, unreachable ideal which poetry intends for itself....’ Its opposite is the familiar sound verse, rebaptized as muzikaal poetry.

The trouble lies in the fact that musisch and muzikaal not only sound similar but are etumological kin. In Dutch musisch is more commonly spelled muzisch, while the suffixes -aal and -isch have the same negligible meaning of ‘pertaining to’. In the Dutch equivalent of The Oxford English Dictionary, Van Dale, muzikaal (its derivation noted there as coming from French) means ‘belonging to music as an art’, or ‘displaying a feeling for music’ or ‘to make an impression like music’. Muzisch is an adjective which ‘pertains to the Muses, to the arts, hence the feeling therefore.’ The latter word has no proper cognate in English, but the close etymological kinship is also clearly evident in our own language. Musical clearly derives from music which, tracing it beyond French, derives from mousikos meaning ‘pertaining to a Muse or Muses, concerning the arts, poetry, literature.’ After one is aware of the history of these terms, Vestdijk's final formulation seems unduly muddled. If anything, musisch should be the general term from which one might extract the particular type of significative poetry. Since Vestdijk ultimately returns to the latter term we will maintain this terminology.^34. But one remains just a little curious why such unfortunate confusion would be perpetrated in a text that was orally delivered and did not have the benefit of printed patience. The main reason it was pursued here was in order to present as comprehensive a development of his theory as possible, while at the same time indicating the intellectual diffidence that lies hidden beneath the assertiveness. Vestdijk was caught between dogmatism and honesty and the trouble can be laid on the doorstep of language - poetical usage in particular. Perhaps we may clarify this as follows.

Vestdijk had a decided preference for poetry that is shaped - shaped in an accountable fashion in both the external and the, if we may put it thus, ideology of content. In the belligerent usage of our day, Vestdijk championed a reactionary, that is to say, an intelligent poetry. He believed in form: in the sense of structure as well as in the development of an idea. With his persistent arguments for order, Vestdijk resembles Yvor Winters, even to the point of concurring in their estimation of Edward Arlington Robinson and Emily Dickenson. Denis Donoghue's apercu of Winters is very much in line with the argument at hand. ‘Grasping “the core of empire in a word”, the poet tries to command his feeling: in poetry, an achieved form is proof that at least on this occasion something has been understood, the chaos of dread asnwered by a form equal and opposite. Such answers are rare and hard to achieve.’^35. Vestdijk, however, was incapable of Winters' desperate dogmatism that finally turned into a wilful astigmatism, Vestdijk's honesty, though born from a similar frustration, drove him to a paradoxical relativism.

34. I was loathe to confuse the reader even furhter. What is presented in the text, up till now, has a purpose, but further obfuscations would be ill suited for a presentation of his theory. For, indeed, Vestdijk makes it even more troublesome. Several pages later (p.130) he inexplicably drops the muzikaal/musisch team and substitutes musisch/significatief. Where formerly musisch would be identical with significatief, it is now equated with muzikaal, significatief is reinstituted in the text and muzikaal disappears except as an adjectival modifier!

35. Denis Donoghue, ‘The Will to Certitude’, Time Literary Supplement, 30 August 1974, p. 918. Vestdijk's sometimes questionable taste was already noted by his contemporary, the poet Hendrik Marsman, ‘S. Vestdijk in Verzameld Werk (Amsterdam: Querido, 1960), p. 772. His admiration for Edward Arlington Robinson can be examined in the essay “Bij een gedicht van E.A. Robinson” in Lier en Lancet, I, pp. 52-71, and may be compared with Yvor Winters’ critical debut on the same poet (1922) now republished in the volume Uncollected Essays and Reviews, ed Francis Murphy (London: Allen Lane, 1974).

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Both Winters and Vestdijk might be said to have a preference for ‘cerebral’ verse, although, with such baptizing, trouble brews in the nominative font, because poetry is a structure of language, used in a specific manner. And it was precisely the commonly associated allusive qualities of poetic speech that Vestdijk was uneasy about. In other words, he reacted agianst the amorphous results that rise from an intoxication with language, Vestdijk was suspicious of Verlaine's rhymed poetics:

De la musique avant toute chose,
Et pour cela préfère l'Impair
Plus vague et plus soluble dans l'air,
Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose.

Ironically, Vestdijk would have agreed with the second line, but only in order to achieve different ends. But he would insist that suaviloquence can become self-indulgent, what Wallace Stevens called ‘the belle design of foppish line’.

Futhermore, there is an inherent contradiction in such practices. Poets who would not mean but be, forget that language does not allow amnesia. Each word, as Auden so well put it, is a ‘little lyric’ by itself - a little lyric that has denotation as its prosody and connotation as its content. Language means. Even when one states chaos one does so in a definitive manner: Verlaine's quatrain is quite decisive about imparing. Because of this paradoxical nature of language, whereby imprecision is labored after with the tools of measurement, there is always an aura of bad faith, if not dishonesty, about deliberate barbarism of vacuity.

Yet this is also true conversely. A poem, shall we say, that strives for objectification, does so in the manner of an island shaped by the confluence of meaning and sound. Quite apart from its meaning, it can be pleasing to the ear. Poetic diction is neither empirical nor scientific. Treatises in didactic verse are relics. So, one may not exclude the insubstantialities of language. Language is intransigent but we should at least be honest enough to recognize its mentality. It is not a vitamin or an ejaculate. As W.K. Wimsatt put it: ‘A poem does not come into existence by accident. The words of a poem, as Professor Stoll has remarked, come out of a head, not out of a hat.’^36.

There are certain basic assumptions that ground Vestdijk's theory. One was, as previously noted, his insistence on the intelligibility of words which, when in a verbal structure, assume an idea. Naturally, a fabricator of theoretical scaffolding builds according to the shape he is to construct. In both theory and practice, Vestdijk's predilection is for significative poetry: a type of verse where emotions are elicited through meaning and not, primarily, by sound, one that uses the ‘business-like word which states.’^37.

But it can never state precisely. Poetry delineates a contiguous reality. For in poetry we do not fix our eyes on reality but, as it were, look just next to it. Such an ‘indirect optics’^38. does not exclude reality, however, for it is merely seen at the same time while turning away from it. Vestdijk, using different comparisons, is speaking here about that curious phenomenon where imprecision

36. W.K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon. Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), p. 4.

37. De glanzende kiemcel (Amsterdam: De Driehoek, 1956), p.130.

38. Kiemcel, p. 234.

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produces precise direction. Where, in order to remember something, we ‘forget’ about it and ‘think of something else’, because it will then ‘come back to us’. Or when you want to hit bull's eye, you aim your rifle slightly away from it; in fact, precise zeroing-in would lose the mark. Such indirect optics account for the ambiguity of poetry. For example Emily Dickensen according to Vestdijk, uses the ‘stylistic medium of concealment, the placing of sidelights or allusions which merely suggest the most important elements [of her work]^39. ‘By indirection find directions out.’

Poetry can speak of diffuse ideas and feelings because it does not state empirically. Perhaps all poetic usage is, compared to scientific discourse, periphrastic. The image, too, is an act of indirect optics, for it does not state exact verisimilitude. In fact, if it did, it would be a direct equation and would belie comparing. Imagery stimulates concordia discors. It is probably the most essential stimulant of poetic style because it compares without precision, achieving a clarity only in the comprehensive act of apprehending the total structure of the poem which came forth from the image. Not surprisingly, Vestdijk considers the image poetry's most essential aspect, ‘more essential than sonority on the one hand or thought on the other,’ although both are necessary to convey it.^40. He compares it to the proof in alcoholic beverages, where it can range from 6 to 90 percent, though such a scale does not indicate arbitration of our preference. After all, ‘we drink even the lightest beer only for the alcohol and not for the 97 percent of malt, hops and water which thin the alcohol in a more or less inadmissable fashion.’^41.

Ironically, the very fact of imagery's inclusiveness predicates concentration. Poetry conjoins: it is ‘precisely the territory where [the rational and the irrational] meet, where, in a mutual magnetism, they display the chance to achieve syntheses of what it is said to be hostile to...’^42. This concentration manifests itself, over against prose, as isolation, since all modes of concentration are indicators of poetic practice. After all, repetition's echo binds; similes merely pinpoint that which metaphor by analogy subverts into a paradoxical unity; rhyme, too, isolates, in the sense of stitching a pattern of fixity that lingers. By virtue of the fact that all such agents install a fixity, they also isolate the poem into a specific unit.

Poetry is more succinct than prose - a cursory statistical glance will support this obvious truth. But, as the above items illustrate, everything in a poem strives towards compression: it isolates in order to expand. This process Vestdijk extends even onto the word. Poetic diction can not explicate, as prose might, but it absorbs such a surfeit of meaning that it, as it were, comes to be ‘under pressure’.^43. In order to relief this tension a poet might add one small detail in order to give the reader pause so that he can orient himself to a specific occurence and retreat from an unrelieved abstraction.^44. This need for attributive adjectives to nick the abstract, as it were, into relief an thereby increasing its scope, is argued via a different circuit in Wimsatt's essay ‘The Substantive Level’ in The Verbal Icon.^45.

Vestdijk extends the meaning even further. Isolation is one of the factors why poems are a ‘microcosm’ which can ‘mirror the universe.’ This corresponds to Wimsatt's ‘concrete universal’, or what Vestdijk in his Dickenson essay called

39. Lier en Lancet, I, p. 19. An interesting analogue may be found in Dupin's reasoning in Poe's ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’. ‘To look at a star by glances - to view it in a side-long way, by turning toward it the exterior portions of the retina (more susceptible of feeble impressions of light than the interior), is to behold the star distinctly - is to have the best appreciation of its lustre - a lustre which grows dim just in proportion as we turn our vision fully upon it. A greater number of rays actually fall upon the eye in the latter case, but, in the former, there is the more refined capacity for comprehension.’

40. Kiemcel, p. 195.

41. Kiemcel, p. 196.

42. ‘Bij een sonnet van Gérard de Nerval’, in Lier en Lancet, II, p.125.

43. Kiemcel, p.197.

44. Kiemcel, p.198.

45. The Verbal Icon, pp.133-151.

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‘the suggestive universality of the monad’. Isolation measures a poem's aseity. Such poetic autarchy is inherent in the metaphor that gave title to his poetics: the shining germ cell. While prose is multicellular, poetry is that ‘small, with vitality laden island which maintains itself in the sea of biological chaos [and a poem] as it were, contains everything... There exist poems which are so perfectly finished and self-contained that they evoke the illusion of mirroring the universe in a magic mirror, or, if not the reality of the universe, at least the probabilities and potentialities which can wax into this universe.’^46.

In his scholarly study of the Dutch poet Albert Verwey, Vestdijk proceeds to make isolation axiomatic. It is poetry's ‘definition’. Isolation has for the poet the effect of retiring into the self as a means of exorcising loneliness, while it elicits in the poem a delimitation towards separation and the specific. Our recognition of whether we are dealing with poetry is due to this ‘atmosphere of alienation or abstraction.’^47. Such an identification can only result from the basic meaning of the word: to draw apart, to be absent in the mind. For thinking is a solitary activity, passes only as clamor in committees. Now we can understand Vestdijk's love for ‘the life of the mind’ which he already admired in Emily Dickenson's poetry. And here were also have the reason for the revealing selection of poets he wrote about: the Dutch poet Verwey, minstrel of the Platonic Idea; Valéry who was fructified by the ‘logos spermatikos’; or Rilke, the poet of concrete universals.^48.

Yet, towards the end of his essay on the latter, Vestdijk criticises the ‘Duineser Elegien’ in order to account for, what he considered to be, a sad decline of Rilke's powers. Quite apart from the desintegration of form (which he saw as a reduction to a series of aphorisms), Vestdijk situates the real problem in the Erkaltung of the content: ‘the abstract emptiness of a system... that is nowhere rooted in reality...’^49. Similarly in his study of Verwey whom he had earlier characterized as a significative poet,^50. he cautions against the narcosis of ideality. ‘.... when everything is subservient to the Idea, mirrors the Idea faithfully, then the poet doesn't have to worry about anything else any longer, then he creates Idea-poetry even when he produces the greatest nonense - there exists then, sub specie aeternitatis, not the least difference between a sonnet by Petrarch and the “la la la” of an idiot.’^51. A sound warning which should include the general aesthetician.

So, where we previously noted Vestdijk's dislike of a kind of poetry that brims over with sound - like a courtesan who perfumes herself so abundantly that scent substitutes for the body - we now realize that he was equally wary of the rarifaction of ideas. An idea must maintain the semblance of an ideograph. Vestdijk argued for a balance between what Wimsatt so nicely called the ‘minimum concrete’ and abstractions. ‘With the concreteness of metaphor, predication is solid or indefinite, and meditation limitless.’^52.

The notion of such a stricture that expands is also basic to the demand for form, even in the most mundane guise of prosodic dress. Everything requires order. The form of content asks for a form of formulation otherwise we have little else than a provisional listing which, in its poverty, sulks like a dictator. This is a prevalent mode for adolescence and retrograde adulthood. So much of contemporary poetry pays lipservice to this spoiled mentality that one accepts

46. Kiemcel, p.33. Such a feeling of independence is echoed in the following remark by the British painter Francis Bacon. ‘I don't think art is available; it's rare and curious and should be completely isolated. One is more aware of it's magic the more it's isolated’. Quoted in the article ‘Bacon's Black Triptychs’, by Hugh M. Davies, Art in America, 63, no.2 (March-April 1975), p.65.

47. Albert Verwey en de Idee (Amsterdam: Polak & Van Gennep, 1965), p.11. In his study of Verwey's poetry we can see another instance of the interrelation of Vestdijk's thought. On page 5 he states: ‘Like every living organism, the poem is selfcontained, incomparable, unique, indivisible.’ Since this difficult study came before his wartime lectures, we can see here the inception of his metaphor of the ‘germ cell’ to be developed in De glanzende kiemcel.

48. For Verwey see Albert Verwey en de Idee (Amsterdam: Polak & Van Gennep, 1965); for Valéry see ‘Valéry en het duistere vers’, in Lier en Lancet, II (Den Haag-Rotterdam: Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 1961), pp. 101-120, ‘De perikelen van het zuivere ik’, and ‘Paul Valéry: meester der antithesen’ is De poolse ruiter (Den Haag: Bert Bakker-Daamen N.V., 1963), pp. 101-119 and 120-128; and for Rilke ‘Rilke als barokkunstenaar’ in Lier en Lancet, I, pp. 80-141.

49. Lier en Lancet, I, p.131.

50. ‘Muzikale en significatieve poëzie’, in Muiterij, II, p.51.

51. Albert Verwey en de Idee, p.129.

52. W.K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon (Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), pp. 138 and 151.

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rigor as a relief. Free verse, in other words, are lines of license. Besides, as Vestdijk also points out, it is contrary to poetry's demand for concentration. ‘A metrically strongly ordered line is, after all, more “concentrated” than an equally long line written in free rhythms...,’ and it shoudl be obvious that a poet who hopes to achieve ‘stylistic concentration’ would be ‘severely handicapped when meter and other formal elements do not support him somewhat or help him on his way.’^53.

But there is an even larger context for this otherwise heuristic invention. If poetry is, at the very least, something of a form of knowledge, we are inevitably dealing with an order. We cannot inform from chaos. Shrapnel is the killing of a grenade. Eden had its adamic notation of order. Chomsky claimed a generative quality of syntax we all share in daily speech so that we will have a communicative order. Belatedly ecology has rediscovered the order of nature where one link maimed invites disaster. Biochemists have related to us a chromosomal prosody. And Vestdijk, as we previously noted, suggested an ‘autonomous structure’ in language as Stoff. It is such a redundant truth, yet it has become opaque in our day. We have forgotten the plain truth that all the disasters we have witnessed are or our own doing. We are autodidacts of chaos. But we should not, therefore, deny the evidence of observation: aberrant behavior is an exception to the norm. Vestdijk belonged to that generation which is now almost extinct; one that saw order and form as a natural prerequisite underlying all our experience as an a priori fact. There was no quarrel. Hence Auden, Valéry, Wallace Stevens or Yvor Winters. But the world they lived in thought increasingly otherwise. Vestdijk also belonged to that generation of gentlemen of sadness.

53. Kiemcel, pp. 65-66.

Prevalence of the sonnet-form

Vestdijk never reneged on his insistence. In his Rilke essay he made the parenthetical observation that the Classical (i.e. achieved balance of form and content) is ‘after all a basic form of our psychic structure, more primitive and impossible to eliminate than one is wont to believe.’^54. Some five years later (between 1942 and 1943) he devoted an essay to the notion of ‘The Necessity of Forms’ wherein he, in typical fashion, shows his commitment and at the same time refuses to legislate. For, while he speaks of autonomous form in poetry, he does so only as a ‘fiction, a working hypothesis which, after use, we can again relegate to its Platonic sphere of a priori statements which cannot be proven.’^55. Yet the illustration for his argument comes from poetry, in fact a form which remained a favorite of his throughout his entire career.

Why, he asks, is the particular prosody of the sonnet form so prevalent in the history of Western poetry? His answer: it is the most expressive form for occidental thinking since the latter is inductive.^56. In other words, there is a basic cast to our Western manner of ratiocination which, when reflected in a poetic medium, shaped itself into the form of a sonnet. His ‘proof’ is ingenious. It centers on the distinctive differences between the octave and sestet. The first is more orderly, symmetrical, two lines longer, concrete, while the sestet is more variable, more confused, more liable to abstract, two lines shorter, and more apt to conclude. ‘The sonnet is a form suited for more or less complicated denoue-

54. Lier en Lancet, I, p.115.

55. ‘De noodzakelijkheid der vormen’, in Essays in duodecimo (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1952), p.151.

56. Essays in duodecimo, p.154.

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ments, surprising pointes, for dialectical reflections on that which announced itself in the octave with epic linearity.’ And what would happen if we turned the sequence around and the sestet preceded the octave? It would be a perfectly possible alternative, though it did not happen to come about. We would then have a ‘manner of complication which flows into epic simplicity; an abstract or psychological summation which is followed by the facts themselves; an interesting argument which invokes a thesis that might just possibly apply.’^57. But since our manner of thinking is experiential, we like to infer laws from particulars - at least, we prefer it, for neither does it exclude deductive possibilities. Hence such an ‘inverted’ sonnet would not be impossible, but it would grate somewhat and seem alien.^58. We may therefore conclude that form is autonomous in the sense that there is a force which seems to channel it towards a specific constituency.

It is easy to see why Vestdijk would elect the sonnet as the most representative form of significative poetry.^59. For one thing, it is the most ‘poetic’ of forms since it best adheres to the rules of concentration. For the sonnet is an ‘architectonic form’ based on a contradiction between two formal elements (i.e. the octave and the sestet). Hence it needs no further elaboration, it preserves its own dialectic, and it is self-contained like a building ‘which is composed of walls and a roof: two contrasting elements which keep each other in balance and which are sufficient unto themselves.’^60. One may, of course, construe all sorts of variations. Yet one can only vary what is already established. Wimsatt underwrites such a claim: ‘In poetry it is with the established techniques that the poet works, and if his “expressiveness”... transcends these, it is not as if they were left behind. The Petrarchan conceits, to take a fairly simple and well understood instance, remain and operate as conceits in the fun which they provide for Sidney, Spenser, or Donne. If they lost their conceited (that is, conceptual) character, they would have no poetic power.’^61. Such a statement needs little proof. Even such innovators as Hopkins or Thomas wrote poems which are transmutations of the sonnet form.

The sonnet has no equal as the genre best suited for contemplation; it favors assertion to suggestion, and wants the plasticity of images while eschewing magical incantation. The sonnet, says Vestdijk, remains the mistress for those poets who would picture a thought, or want to objectify either by means of a ‘philosophical thought, or a remarkable plastic image, or in a businesslike statement.^62. And his final definition of the form is most apt when one considers it to be the formulation of a man who not only wrote a great number of sonnets with incredible ease (including a sonnet cycle of 150 poems) but who is primarily known as a novelist of some 60 works of fiction. Within the confines of poetry ‘a form such as the sonnet allows its maker to offer argument and reflection to a development of thought, without succumbing to the dangers of prose.’^63.

57. Duodecimo, p.154.

58. An example of an inverted sonnet can be found, according to R.A. Cornets de Groot, in the libretto Merlijn: Verzameld Werk, III (Amsterdam-Den Haag: Athenaeum-Polak & Van Gennep, Bert Bakker, De Bezige Bij, Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 1971), pp. 268-9. R.A. Cornets de Groot, De Chaos en de Volheid (Den Haag: Bert Bakker-Daamen N.V., 1966), p.85.

59. Kiemcel, p. 147 en p. 159.

60. Kiemcel, p. 160.

61. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon, p.129.

62. Kiemcel, p.151.

63. Kiemcel, p.154. In an essay from 1940, ‘Het lyrische beginsel bij Boutens’, Vestdijk speaks again of the sonnet as his favorite form, emphasizing similar aspects as he did is, De glanzenden kiemcel. For example, the sonnet's ability to contain a process of thought, its more laconic use of language which is requirement of the form. Although an early text, he already calls it a significative form par excellence: Muiterij tegen het etmaal II (Den Haag: Bert Bakker-Daamen N.V., 1966), pp. 24-28. One can also add here another stitch to his theoretical knitting. In the same essay we find an intimation of the metaphor of creativity which was to take full shape in De glanzende kiemcel, three years later: ‘Boutens heeft in de moederaarde der taal gegraven, op zoek naar de daarin aanwezige zaden - zaden die nu zelden meer ontkiemen en bloei dragen,.... maar die... naar hun elementaire onmiddellijkheid, hun primordialiteit, toch zeker ‘lyrisch’ te noemen zijn - naar hun lyrisch ‘beginsel.’ (pp. 26-7) In a footnote on p.27 he comparis this ‘lyrical principle’ to a ‘lyrische wortelstok’ (‘lyrical rhizome’). An even earlier inception is, as mentioned before, in Albert Verwey en de Idee, p.5.

Excursion about Poetry of love

A poet with such an unabashed preference for the life of the mind would naturally elect thought as the main subject for poetry. But it is a content always adumbrated by the plasticity of imagery. The critical position is amply docu-

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mented by his essays on Valéry, Dickenson, Rilke, Nijhoff, as well as the fact that he devoted his only booklength study in criticism to a most cerebral Dutch poet, Albert Verwey. Hopefully this sounds no longer like a subjective edict but like a conclusion derived at from the preceding discourse which stressed that ‘the art of words is an intellectual art, and the emotions of poetry are simultaneous with conceptions and largely induced through the medium of conceptions.’^64.

But poetry thinks differently than philosophy does. Vestdijk would have agreed with Wallace Stevens' idea that verse ‘from the poem of the mind in the act of finding’ and would have applauded the American's ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’, the latter term in the sense of shaping as well as not being equal to reality. Vestdijk examined a similar endeavor in Albert Verwey en de Idee (Albert Verwey and the Idea), being a discourse on the work of a poet who was decidedly cerebral and devoted to Platonism. The ruling metaphor for this excursion into the abstract is the antithesis of snow-crystal and snowball: the one precise the other a random forming by the hand of chance. Yet the snowball is composed of snowcrystals: notes toward a supreme fiction.^65.

But I would try to exact a more confining notion of the reality that poetry circumscribes. Vestdijk proves to be elusive, as ever. In Albert Verweyy en de Idee he defines idea as ‘the antinomy between poet and reality, bridged, but not resolved, in that very poetry.’^66. One should note again the emphasis on elusion, on the inchoate, on a process achieved by diminution. Vestdijk constantly underlines this inconclusive movement, where the thought pulls the poem to the general while the image anchors it in the particular. In other words, Vestdijk constantly posits a synthesis but, upon closer examination, it is one that refuses to jell. Such is the nature of poetry. From the examples of this process in De glanzende kiemcel (The Shining Germ Cell), augmented by instances from his critical essays where he isolated similar inclinations in specific poets, we begin to see a pattern which shaped his opinion of what poetry's proper domain was. It is a point of view consistent with the rest of his work, especially his novels, if not his scholarship.

To illustrate poetry's desire for (but not necessarily achievement of) synthesis, Vestdijk notes that love poetry never lauds a specific woman, no matter what the instigation might have been. The woman in adoration is ‘representative of a type or an Idea.’^67. This Platonic notion appears to be almost mandatory when Vestdijk insists on this deliberate separation. In De glanzende kiemcel (The Shining Germ Cell) he merely refers to Rilke as an apt example, but in his long essay on the poet, the reasons are more specific. Vestdijk sees in Rilke's work an obsession with a retrograde love, akin to Nietzsche's Fernstenliebe, a love that does not wish to possess but which, in fact, would refuse possession.^68.

In an essay on ‘Luke Havergal’, a poem by Edward Arlington Robinson, Vestdijk makes the hyperbolic claim that it is ‘one of the finest syntheses of poetry and mystical philosophy that we have.’^69. Surely this is an excessive appreciation. A subjective error, but one that was entirely due to its content and Vestdijk's interpretation of it. For ‘Luke Havergal’ deals with the loss of a loved one and, from Vestdijk's point of view, the poem is about ‘placing the loved object at an infinite distance’, a desire contiguous with an ‘objectification of love itself in terms of a specific desire which, in principle, can no longer be satisfied

64. W.K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon, p.165.

65. There is little point in exploring this difficult study. For one thing, it presupposes a working knowledge of a poet few outside of Holland would have heard of. If anyone ever read Verwey's name it would have been in connection with his realationship with Stefan George. But the fact that Vestdijk devoted his only book-length study to an exclusively cerebral poet, betrays the choice as predilection.

66. Albert Verwey en de Idee, p.85.

67. De glanzende Kiemcel, p.206.

68. Lier en Lancet, I, p.131.

69. Lier en Lancet, I, p.60. Note, however, how this poem is merely ‘fascinating’ on p.16!

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nor even answered. Because satisfaction... can only be conceived in the context of a tangible reality which can be possessed and enjoyed.’^70. Such a possibility, however, is not realized.

In his essay on Emily Dickenson, Vestdijk chooses as his favorite a poem which, via the description of a couple separated by time, speaks of a love which feeds on loneliness.^71. As she does with her love, she also aims her metaphysical desire at infinity. And when the unattainable appears not unattainable enough, she herself will push it further back.’^72.

Vestdijk would make this concept axiomatic for our time. In a seemingly superfluous footnote to a poem which deals with ‘that which one experiences only in desire’, he adds the commentary: ‘This mentality which places desire above possession and which prefers love to the loved one, is especially modern.’^73.

Exactly to what degree he considers this to be the exclusive domain of poetry can be seen in De glanzende kiemcel (The Shining Germ Cell) where, under the rubric of repetition in poetry, he extends that technical principle into a metaphysical one. After naming a number of poems which share the notion of ‘return’ (examples gleaned from Rilke and Verwey), he continuous: ‘What many of these poems have in common is an expectant, charged, somewhat ghostly atmosphere. This shouldn't surprise us since a ghost is, by definition, something or someone who “returns”: just think of the French word “revenant”. The past and the desire to relive it, the transitoriness of all things which make return impossible but which make us also long for it - these are elements which would have to be considered as a characteristic motif for poetry.’ In fact, what he saw in Rilke as a ‘retrograde love’ is now extended to the poet himself, for he is not progressive at all but decidedly regressive.^74. It comes as no surprise that Vestdijk's favorite author was Proust, that he wrote a Socratic dialogue on the nature of time entitled The Eternal Too Late (Het eeuwige telaat) and published an epic poem about Mnemosyne (Mnemosyne in de bergen).

To be sure, this is all justified. Idealization of the loved one, for instance, holds truck with the occidental urge to abstract, while the sense of loss and the corresponding longing, is reflected in poetry's tension, created by opposing opposites which will not conclude. And in the light of Vestdijk's other work, all of this is very intimate to his own perceptions.

Yet, despite the fact that any doctrine such as this is very much a gloss on the author's inclinations, one cannot help but see a family resemblance. For, even though one would have to render a Fortran decision, I would hazard the suggestion that most modern poetry is in principle elegiac. We are moved by loss; more awed by a rendering of the essential incommensurability of existence than we are by pure joy, by a considered perfection. This could also be attacked as a personal observation, yet I would consider it a truth that we are mixed beings with little certainty to cherish. We live a string of epiphanies. Being a mode of communication which thrives on imperfection in order to disclose more - a form of expression that unites intellect and emotion - poetry is outstandingly suited to deal with such enigmas. More than other form of art, poetry recalls.

The Greeks, as usual, included a premonition of this in their myths.

70. Lier en Lancet, I, pp. 70-71.

71. Lier en Lancet, I, p.46.

72. Lier en Lancet, I, p.32.

73. Albert Verwey en de Idee, p.125.

74. Kiemcel, p.218. Vestdijk's theories find a present-day echo in Susan Sontag's essay ‘On Style’, even including a similar interpretation of the mnemonic character of literature. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, 1966; rpt. (New York: Dell, 1969), pp. 24-45.

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Mnemosyne is the mother of the Muses, Orpheus, the primordial poet, failed an experiment at resurrection when he wished to reclaim Eurydice from Hades. One could interpret this to be a warning that the poet may not achieve ideality in the flesh. For if Orpheus had succeeded wouldn't he have won a perpetuation of life beyond death, would he have made reality immortal? His looking back might be an act of love, but it could also have been triggered by curiosity, and his glance could be seen as memory verifying its actuality. This could not be, of course, for time would have been defeated. And ever since that fatal journey, poets have been trying to capture irreality in a glance and keep on reaching back for the hand of Eurydice.

Hence poetry about love remains a major mode because any consideration of this basic aspiration inevitably predicates loss, will have to face time and pain. There is no certainty about the other, no manner in which I can assure myself that I know her completely. Perhaps when poets retreat to their own ego, it might be a last-ditch effort at a solipsistic cognate. It's all we know.

And even when, with the winds of change, there are movements afoot to inoculate reality, poetry fails to submit to the cure. It either becomes a drab collation of snippets (Ginsburg's latest efforts) or it will undermine the dogmatic prescriptions (as was the case with Imagism). What, for instance, is so precise about Pound's own famous entry ‘In a station of the Metro’?

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

The ‘apparition’ of the first line ruins every attempt at concrete definition, while the metaphor in the second nudges a pendulum of meaning into motion which does not still into precision.

To use Gottfried Benn's terminology, Vestdijk was both phenotypical as well as genotypical in his predilections. Any attempt at solidifying an unalterable definition of poetry will fail, due to the protean manner in which it uses language. Indeed, it is due to the very nature of language itself and, although the choice of retrograde love is ingenious in its personal application for Vestdijk, the poetics I have described here are a cogent reflection of a prevalent concern in contemporary literature and philosophy.

On language

Language is a necessary evil. All the more evil because of its inevitability. Its Janus qualities were once explored by rhetoric in a pragmatic fashion for capital ends, while philosophers kept on using it as if it were synonymous with thought. The former went sour with the two world wars, while the latter began to be a questionable position with Kant's critique. In our century it is particularly Wittgenstein who challenged philosophy's use of language, thereby unsettling ontology. It would seem that this was the result of a consistent honesty - one that may well lead to despair. Vestdijk was well aware of the treachery of language despite the fact that its very Janus qualities are precisely those which poetry thrives on. I would deem him an honest mind who, even when beating

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about the bush, could not help but return to the hunt.

If language, which distinguishes us as human, is perfidious, what then is the nature of what it registers? Is reality, human experience, emotions, is our very thought just as deceitful? An honest response might well affirm. And if we deny it and hope to presume an ideal, if only for comfort, then Vestdijk's enforced regression is an act of despair, an armed admission never victorious. Perhaps it was precisely such a circular confrontation which demanded his refusal to synthesize, that made his theoretical writing so slippery. Idiosyncratic as that writing might be, it is also proof of his intellectual honesty. Just like Wittgenstein, Vestdijk can be very assertive in his diction while the import of his syntax is as negatory as that of the Austrian philosopher. The only escape vent we might have left is in fictive shapes, where the rigor (almost suicidal) of philosophy can be loosened. Which is precisely what Vestdijk did. It is also the direction Wittgenstein pointed toward.

A great deal of modern philosophy is a critique of language. The following gloss on Wittgenstein's work by one of his foremost British critics, condenses the argument.

The facts [about language] are to be collected because they point beyond themselves. They point back in the direction from which critical philosophy has traveled in the last two centuries. They have, therefore, a significance which cannot be caught in any scientific theory. They are the conductors through which the feelings and aspirations of precritical philosophy are to be grounded. The task of collecting them and arranging them is more like the work of an artist than of a scientist.^75.

The first point refers to precritical philosophy. It is indicative that Plato dealt so harshly with poets in his Republic (Book X), accusing them of falsifying reality because the poetic use of language is a charm to beguile us into believing thrice removed imitations. Philosophy, on the other hand, dealt in direct truth. Plato's position is so interesting if only because it implies the persuasive power of language when it is used in a pleasing manner.

One of Plato's bêtes noirs was the Sophist Gorgias of Leontini (490-375 B.C.), who held that language does not communicate the reality of things but only that of words. Gorgias, in fact, discovered the autonomy of language, hence viewed persuasion as an art of enchantment, a techne which was to be exploited.^76. Such a point of view which was not at all disturbed by its amoral implications, was decidedly anti-Platonic but, furthermore, Gorgias also implies the second point of the paragraph on Wittgenstein: he makes the employment of language an artful device. Though it would be summarily dismissed by Plato, the concept of philosophy as a fiction is implicit in his novelistic use of scene and character and his dramatic use of dialogue.^77. One could discuss the methods of both Plato and Gorgias as games, where one has to accept and conform to rules pertinent to that endeavor only. Philosophy as fiction is not such an outrageous notion since the conception of its methods demands that we agree with an assumption that cannot be proven or it resolves around an image such as the pre-Socratic ones of water or fire, Descartes' cosmic clockwork. Leibnitz' monads (with or without

75. David Pears, Ludwig Wittgenstein (New York: ThyViking Press, 1970), p.112.

76. Charles P. Segal, ‘Gorgias and the Psychology of the Logos’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philologie, volume 66 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1962), p.110.

77. This is also mentioned by Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 5th ed. (Haarlem: Tjeenk Willink, 1958), p.152-155.

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windows), and so on. Even Heidegger's exploration of the substratum of philosophical discourse used a poet's oeuvre as a crib: it is often difficult to follow his argument if one does not know Hölderlin's work intimately.

Gorgias's techne can be used cynically, in the manner of a pool hustler. As a saying, attributed to him, states: ‘Orators are like frogs: the latter sing in the water, the former to the water-clock.’^78. The Sophists thrived on it and their ‘songs’ were equally lucrative for medieval Scholastics. Abelard, among others, argued for a living, and Rabelais gives some outrageous examples when such practices degenerated into nonsense.^79. Yet despite such professional clowning, the working hypothesis discloses a schism that can never be fully arbitrated. It echoes the ancient question: does language reflect the objects out there or does language create them? In other words, is language epistemological or is it separate from reality? The Stoff, so to speak, of philosophy is thought. Left to its own devices it would never be known. To convey it we need language. But in such an act of communication, does language truthfully reflect our thinking or is it an arbitrary conveyance?

In 1938, Johan Huizinga came out on the side of Gorgias, replacing in fact homo sapiens with homo ludens. His discourses on the ludic principle of language, wisdom, poetry and philosophy could be read as artful commentaries on Wittgenstein's philosophy.^80. For the Austrian philosopher turned from a Platonist view, where language is determined by the conceptual scheme of the world (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) to arguing that language is an autonymous structure and therefore rather arbitraty (Philosophische Untersuchungen).

In the latter work, Wittgenstein declared language to be incommensurable with thought; indeed, ‘die Philosophische Probleme entstehen, wenn die Sprache feiert [sic]’. (I, par. 38). What we have, he says, are games, and their number is not to be fixed. With Gorgias and Huizinga in mind, we can now see that such endless variations preclude certainty: philosophy, or at least logic, cannot denote an absolute. We are given the rules and play according to them, but both the rules as well as the game can change.

Und diese Mannigfaltigkeit ist nichts Festes, ein für allemal Gegebenes; sondern neue Typen der Sprache, neue Sprachspiele, wie wir sagen können, entstehen und andre verlaten und werden vergessen. (I, § 23).

Meaning is independent (I, § 40), philosophy does not command language (I, § 122, § 124), indeed may get entangled in it.

Die Sprache ist ein Labyrinth von Wegen. Du kommst von einer [sic] Seite und kennst dich aus; du kommst von einer andern zur selben Stelle, und kennst dich nicht mehr aus. (I, § 203)

The entire problem is summed up in Wittgenstein's famous dictum: ‘Die Philosophie ist ein Kampf gegen die Verhexung unsres Verstandes durch die Mittel unserer Sprache.’ (I, § 109). A statement far more sinister than Gorgias ever imagined.^81.

The work of Wittgenstein probes such premises with relentlessly honest elabo-

78. Fragment 30 in the translation of Diels: Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, published as Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, ed. H. Diels, trans. Kathleen Freeman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), p.139.

79. Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book II, chapters 10-13, Book I, chapter 19, Book III, chapters 39-43.

80. Compare chapters 2,6, 7 and 9 in Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, (Haarlem; Tjeenk Willink, 1958).

81. Consider the following example (I, 249): ‘Sind wir vielleicht voreilig in der Annahme, dass das Lächeln des Säuglings nicht Verstellung ist?’ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968), p.90.

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rations. Its further implications can be persued in his commentators.^82. That it is a prevalent dilemma, one wrought with despair, can be seen in the work of Sartre or Gottfried Benn, who called himself a ‘poor braindog’, in George Steiner's criticism or in the poetry of Paul Celan, to name but a few examples.^83.

Yet it is precisely this very affrontery of language that poetry feeds on. And if one is both poet and thinker it grates. One exploits what one opposes; a case of favoring an aching tooth. And lauding such exploitation is particularly unsettling in times of societal opheaval when Gorgias' techne is dictated to be the truth. The game becomes reality. So it is a measure of his intellectual honesty that Vestdijk addressed himself to this very problem in 1942-43, when Holland was occupied by an enemy who said he came to liberate a people that was free. During this time he wrote three essays which deal specifically with the negatory character (‘Philosophy of Metaphor,’ ‘Oppressive Ideals,’ ‘The Essence of the Paradox’), while at the same time praising these very qualities in the lectures which form his poetics, De glanzende kiemcel (The Shining Germ Cell). It all depends, as Wittgenstein said, on where you enter the labyrinth.

A case in point is metaphor. In De glanzende kiemcel (The Shining Germ Cell), Vestdijk discusses the positive importance of this poetic vehicle. He delights in the fact that for modern poetry imagery has become direct: i.e. simile becomes metaphor. The word that indicates comparison has been suppressed and, to refer to a previous example, people s faces are ‘petals on a wet, black bough.’ But in ‘Philosofie der metafoor’ (‘Philosophy of the Metaphor’) Vestdijk discovers a demonix aspect that can overpower us. There is a kind of magic when two dissimilar entities are being compared: the ‘like’ or ‘as if’ insinuates similarity and has the ‘tendency to requisition identification.’^84. In an image that reminds one of Wittgenstein's dictum, Vestdijk compares this basic feature of language with the sorcerer's apprentice in Goethe's poem (where the broom may be interpreted as a servant and, therefore, becomes one). Language bewitches us. And if the sorcerer who controls it practices black magic we are in trouble. For the danger of metaphors lies in their ability to bypass their efficacy of compression or adoration in order to proceed to usurp the plane of thought by insisting on a judgment: a simple form of syllogistic reasoning whereby analogy is elevated to conclusion. If we compare a man's face to that of a tiger we can then infer, by analogy, that his character is murderous while, in fact, he may have the disposition of a lamb.^85. Vestdijk concludes: ‘While we are thinking, the thought or concept should remain in charge, not the word, though it is an irreplaceable aid. He who lets language think for itself is dealing with a broom which went berserk.... That this tactic is used especially by political propaganda is, I hope, self-evident.’^86. The similarity to Wittgenstein's statement is striking.

The autonomy of language is negatively underlined when we discover how it can bequeath us ‘Oppressing Ideals’ (‘Drukkende Idealen’), particularly by means of the grammatical moods of the future and imperative. Words spoken in the future tense beguile us to think that we can indeed fulfill our promises, while the imperative mood dictates the success of what might be no more than a possibility. This is particularly true for ideals expressed as commandments. They are, as Vestdijk points out, utter limits, not descriptions of possibilities, and, more

82. The ones I consulted, for example the articles: E.B. Greenwood, ‘Tolstoy, Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer: Some Connections’; Peter Hacker, ‘Net of Language’, both in Encounter, 36, no. 4 (april 1971), pp. 60-72 and 84-89. Also R.F. Beerling, ‘Oefeningen in Wittgenstein’, in De Gids, 137, no. 1 (1974), pp. 48-58. Furthermore: Normam Malcolm: Ludwig Wittgenstein. A Memoir. 1958, rpt (London: Oxford University Press, 1972); C.A. van Peursen Ludwig Wittgenstein. trans Rex Ambler (New York: Dutton, 1970); David Pears, Ludwig Wittgenstein (New York: The Viking Press, 1970).

83. Jean-Paul Sartre, La Nausée (Paris: Gallimard, 1938); for Gottfried Benn, see my essay ‘Octopus or Angel: Gottfried Benn (1886-1956),’ in Modern Occasions 2, ed. Philip Rahv (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1974), pp. 257-273; for Celan particularly, Paul Celan, Sprachgitter (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1961); George Steiner, Language and Silence (Athenaeum: New York, 1967), Extra-Territorial (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), and After Babel (London: Oxford University Press, 1975). 85.

84. ‘Philosofie der Metafoor’, in Essays in Duodecimo (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1952), p.113.

85. Essays in duodecimo, pp. 118-119.

86. Duodecimo, p.119.

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often than not, far from condusive to practical behavior. If one says to a mouse that he be a lion we are asking him to cease being what he is and make him aspire to a ‘feline imperative’ that will be detrimental. It is the curse of generality that morality is so fond of admonishing. So Vestdijk asks rhetorically if the ten commandments did not prescribe transgressions which were quite possibly absent before their issuance. The conscience of a people was presented with crimes they had not as yet committed but were now told they were capable of. Ideals, in other words, ask too much of us, and they do so by a simple grammatical agreement. ‘The road to hell is not paved with good intentions but with grammatically ordered nonsense.’^87. An aphorism that could be a motto for our times.

Being sentient creatures we are trapped. In ‘The Essence of Paradox’ (‘Het wezen van de paradox’), Vestdijk defines it as a ‘product resulting from the friction between language and reality.’ The important point here is that he recognizes the two poles as different structures. But language can usurp a position wherein it assumes the likeness of reality. Seeming contradictions in the game of logic, for example, can be annihilated by reference to reality. But this is no longer true when the logical conclusion has been generally accepted as a model for conduct. Vestdijk's humanity in the discussion of these crucial problems (which grew out of a consideration of language) lies in his refusal to allow the ideal the upperhand. The common insistence, he argues, has to be tested against individual contentions. He applies the same standard for the existence of paradox. In an antinomy - which is a contradiction between conclusions that appear to be equally logical - the first set of conclusions are generally of a collective nature while the second are usually individual.^88. There is no solution here: one can investigate but not conclude. The absolute is a fiction, the relative is reality. By dint of mental effort one can, of course, reverse these two propositions. But it would be solipsistic.

Reminiscent of Martin Buber's theory, Vestdijk reduces the entire problem to the basic paradox of I and the Other. This is only true, he cautions, when we are concerned with man. ‘I and the Other exclude each other “logically”, yet, nevertheless, they [are] in reality the two most important aspects of our life which constantly merge, mutually penetrate, and are quite inseparable.’^89. Perhaps we have reached an impasse here. For with the latter quote we entered the realm of Vestdijk's fiction where this essential paradox shaped the frustration of his novels in a more psychological manner. Yet there is a consistency. Whatever can be adjured here only in terms of poetic and language, has ramifications that will resemble other branches of his work.

87. Duodecimo, p.17.

88. ‘Het wezen van de paradox’, in Essays in duodecimo, p.203. In connection with the next sentence in the text, note how Wittgenstein called his work ‘philosophical investigations’ and can hardly be said to have come to a conclusion.

89. Duodecimo, p.204.

The poem as a germ-cell

There is an oscillating manner to Vestdijk's thinking which indicates frustation. Nothing is ever certain or finalized. Opposites confront without, settlement. There is no stasis. Vestdijk thrived on what he called ‘dynamic polarities’. His theory, his poetry, his novels, everything testifies to restlessness, to a vitality that keeps on spilling over. Never adhering to an either/or position, Vestdijk persistently tracked down both/and. A and B are required; a trends towards

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exclusion (A rather than B) is dangerous because it refuses to consider possibility or ambiguity - because it denies life.

Such a positive conception of poetry is reflected in the basic metaphor for his poetics. Poetry is the germ cell, prose the multicellular organism.^90. And what Vestdijk most prizes in his biological comparison is the tension, the opposition harbored within a single unit. For a germ cell is both structure and fluidity, stasis and growth. Organic zest shapes but it does not still. It is revealing that Vestdijk, who had acquired a scientific background from his study of medicine, choose the most basic form of existence, one, as recent biology has begun to unveil, that is constantly becoming, that is sufficient unto itself and, yet, despite its elementary role, one that is fantastically complex and indispensable.

That is to say that such a more accomplished structure as a tree, is finished in its branching. An oak cannot be a birch. But a germ cell has the possibility to be all forms and it knows as yet no specialization that would imprison it. As Lewis Thomas wrote: such a reflection would allow us ‘a glimpse of the process that brought single separate cells together for the construction of metazoans, culminating in the invention of roses, dolphins, and, of course, ourselves.’^91.

Such a determined energy is evident, as we saw, in Vestdijk's refusal to allow either form or content to be predominant. And when he would incline toward form, he will argue content to be a variation of it, thereby insuring that both will escape petrification. The same need for motility is evident in the critical judgments which were quoted previously. He praises Emily Dickenson's energetic interplay of thesis and antithesis without ebbing into synthesis, a vibrancy which he sees reflected in a style which he calls suggestive rather than explicit. Rilke's genius lay precisely in his dynamism; it is evident in his content even, which is always in motion, and quite plain in his verse of flowing syntax and fondness for enjambement. And if Rilke finds this surge otherwise impossible he will compare a recalcitrant object to a motion or invent one. In fact, the kernel of Rilke's work, according to Vestdijk, is Verwandlung. In a passage toward the end of his scholarly study of a kindred poet, Vestdijk praises this discovery as being particularly noteworthy of Dutch poetry.

This is especially true of the dynamic, un-Latin practice of art that is aimed at infinity (and where it may gradually lose itself). In our country it will probably remain a major mode. We are not Classical and we shall remain so. We - that is to say, the best among us - accept the artist with all his imperfections, and not from a sense of geniality, piety or academic byzantism, but because we know that such imperfections form the negative conditions for culminations which are not within reach of the Classical artist. We do not canonize someone on the grounds of his intention which is expressed in the humanly imperfect work.^92.

So, despite critical ordinations, Vestdijk never allowed form to be a petty tyrant. Yet if the given of reality, if not of language, is amorphous, contradictory, indeed, a paradox, then the constraints of form become useful. As it was for Auden, form was a welcome aid for Vestdijk. But it is a prime, not a final mover. It is welcome precisely because the substance it envelops is elusive. The paradox

90. De glanzende kiemcel (Amsterdam: De Driehoek, 1956), p.32.

91. Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell (New York: Viking Press, 1974), p.29.

92. Albert Verwey en de Idee (Amsterdam: Polak & Van Gennep, 1965), p.210.

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lies in the fact that language inevitably carries meaning. From this, logically, comes Vestdijk's predilection for content, thought, for the ‘ideology’ of verse. Left to itself, a word goes on vacation, while form gives it an itinerary. Or as Auden puts it: ‘If one plays a game, one need rules, otherwise there is no fun. The wildest poem has to have a firm basis in common sense, and this, I think, is the advantage of formal verse. Aside from obvious corrective advantages, formal verse frees one from the fetters of one's ego.’^93.

So there is a pragmatism as well as a metaphysics of necessity. Form is the universal of our lives. Nature thrives on it. A poet is a maker who provides coherence to that which was shapeless before. The formal aspects of either poetry or fiction are, for Vestdijk, something like isometric exercises: to shape a figure of speech by exerting pressure against the boundaries of a preordained configuration. It aids rather than inhibits - a lesson most modern practice falls foul of.

One can see the pitfalls when dealing with such a problem. Anyone who cherishes the life of the mind and knows that we are specimens of the genus homo sapiens, realizes that formulation is requisite for all meaningful endeavor. Flailing in a broth of potentiality gets us no further than our ancestral soup. Yet an exclusive devotion to form alone leads to rigidity. The nature of language is perplexing, while the communication of nature is precise.

Perhaps it is in this respect that language differs, most sharply from other biologic systems for communication. Ambiguity seems to be an essential, indispensable element for the transfer of information from one place to another by words, where matters of real importance are concerned. It is often necessary, for meaning to come through, that there be an almost vague sense of strangeness and askewness. Speechless animals and cells cannot do this. The specifically locked-on atigen at the surface of a lymphocyte does not send the cell off in search of something totally different; when a bee is tracking sugar by polarized light, observing the sun as though consulting his watch, he does not veer away to discover an unimaginable marvel of a flower. Only the human mind is designed to work in this way, programmed to drift away in the presence of locked-on information, straying from each point in a hunt for a better, different point.
If it were not for the capacity for ambiguity, for the sensing of strangeness, that words in all languages provide, we would have no way of recognizing the layers of counterpoint in meaning, and we might be spending all our time on stone fences, staring into the sun. To be sure, we would always have had some everyday use to make of the alphabet, and we might have reached the same capacity for small talk, but it is unlikely that we would have been able to evolve from words to Bach. The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.^94.

Hence the way we perceive reality as a mental spectacle is a contradiction. Therefore our most cogent mode of perception is indirect. This, in turn, is best provided by poetry. The content of poetry is a form of knowledge contradistinct from science of logic and, therefore, closer to a syncretic truth. Thus Vestdijk will acknowledge, indeed insist on, the preference for form as a natural correlary

93. W.H. Auden, ‘The Art of Poetry XVII (An Interview),’ in The Paris Review, 14, no.57 (Spring 1974), p.44. Compare this with Vestdijk's remarks, also in an interview: Theun de Vries, Hernomen konfrontatie met S. Vestdijk (Amsterdam: De Arbeiderspers, 1968), p.163.

94. Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell, p.94.

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to our mental activities. But what this form contains is ambiguous, due to the nature of language and realiality, and very much a form of form in its own right. It is a useful distinction.

But then, why not a formalism that binds? Because it would be contrary to experience. Honesty forbids preclusion. Vestdijk resisted the temptation to be definitive because, despite the healing desire for stasis and certainty, the nature of our experience forbids it to be so. For a mind who was always characterized as being analytical, there is a fine irony in the fact that the practice of his art allowed him no such rest. Even in his theoretical writings one will find most assertions undermined by conditional clauses, like a general establishing salients by means of diversionary tactics.

To sum up a paradox: the material is ambiguous, the reality it reflects evasive, the truth of perception lies not in precision. It so happens that this is also tantamount to a metaphysics, so that we have Vestdijk being particularly cogent about a form of writing which happens to refract his basic perception of experience very well. To convey mystery one need not strain credulity. An accumulation of precision which defies the sum of its parts will do so much more superlatively than obfuscation. This is the secret of Kafka and the formula of the best of surrealism, especially Magritte.

At the heart of Vestdijk's art is mystery and bafflement. And pain. There is innocence or stupidity in assuming solutions. The best know otherwise. Auden, a poet Vestdijk had something in common with, summed it up this way.

The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews,
Not to be born is the best for man;
The second-best is a formal order,
The dance's pattern; dance while you can.

For Vestdijk, who could range over vast stretches of material in his novels or theoretical writings, who's forte was psychological portrayals which, by their very nature, could not be final - for such a writer, painfully aware of the indeterminateness of being, poems were epiphanies of isolation. The latter to be taken in its double sense of demarcation as well as solitude. For Vestdijk poetry is comforting because, though diminutive, it is definitive in appearance. Even so, it vibrates with generation. To have it both ways is a boon.

Part two - practice of poetry

It is striking how accurately Vestdijk understood his own poetry. Practice and theory compliment each other. Perhaps his exetensive disquisitions were a combative exegesis of a poetry few people took to heart. For, despite his enormous output (over 1500 pages of verse), his reputation is still primarily affirmed by his fiction and intellectual writings. This is undoubtedly lopsided for, as one would expect of someone of Vestdijk's genius, there are scores of texts which can testify to superiority.^95.

Practically all his commentators are struck by the cerebrality of Vestdijk's verse.^96. What is meant is their knottiness, the angularity of expression which

95. The following remarks will be general and a gloss rather than a minute textual reading. The very bulk of the poetry prevents detail in a text that wants to attempt a comprehensive view of Vestdijk's work. In addition there is the restrictive fact that, in order to speak with ease about poetry, one should be able to comment directly from the original and not via pale transliterations. But I hope to be excused for my parti pris.

96. Menno ter Braak, De Duivelskunstenaar (Amsterdam: L.J. Veen, 1945), p.12; E. Du Perron, Verzameld Werk, VI (Amsterdam: Van Oorschot, 1958), p.21; H. Marsman, Verzameld Werk (Amsterdam: Querido, 1960), p. 769; Max Nord, ‘De duizendvoudige tong’, in Over S. Vestdijk, ed. Max Nord (Amsterdam: Bezige Bij, n.d.) p.35; Gerard Knuvelder, Handboek tot de Moderne Nederlandse Letterkunde ('s-Hertogenbosch: Malmberg, 1964), p.139; Th. Govaart, Simon Vestdijk (Desclée de Brouwer, 1960), p.30; Reinder P. Meijer, Literature of the Low Countries (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1971), p. 335; H.U. Jesserun d'Oliveira, ‘De Halsband los’, in Vondsten en bevindingen (Amsterdam: Polak & Van Gennep, 1967), p.99.

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refuses to smooth into lyricism. To be sure, there are felicitous lines that have a musical cadence, but the total impression is one of pollard trees which are prevented from flowing with the wind. But then Vestdijk was not interested in sonority of sound but in the felicity of thought. Words are impressed in the service of an idea, and it is their connotative prowess that is mustered. When they fall in with syntax or meter they form a ragged line because their favor lies not in appearance but in their instrinsic worth.

This is, as is well known, the major mode of modern poetry. The angularity of Marianne Moore's poetry, for instance, at first grated on Auden's finely tuned ear but upon more savoring, it disclosed to him much precision and delight.^97. This is also true for Pound and Eliot where formulation is the hallmark for our memory which is no longer knotted by a metric shuttle. Indeed, Vestdijk's significative verse has been the major mode for nearly half a century.

To underscore such an intention, one notices that Vestdijk's diction combines quotidian and rhetorical language. Where in Dutch poetry certain words and expressions are used to preserve a certain decorative elevation, Vestdijk, while still borrowing from such rhetoric, wil substitute most unlikely words to achieve a precision that is otherwise not so definitive. This can be done within one line, as the following examples from different stages of his career, indicate.

Vertrouw'lijk schoof hij in 't klassegedoe (1935)
[With a familiar air he shoved into the hubbub of the class]

Schiep 'k de student, die droomde en dagdiefde (1946)
[I created the student, who dreamt and mooned]^98.

The fact that my transliterations are barely adequate testifies to the originality of Vestdijk's work. While one might more easily expect this of poetry, it is also very much the case with his prose. The irony is biting, for Vestdijk, stamped with the label of intellectuality is nearly impossible to reproduce in another tongue. If his main import were ratiocination only, such hazards would be greatly mitigated. What for Hannah Arendt indicated the genius of Auden may be shared by Vestdijk.

Where such fluency is achieved, we are magically convinced that everyday speech is latently poetic, and, taught by the poets, our ears open up to the true mysteries of language. The very intranslatibility of one of Auden's poems is what, many years ago, convinced me of his greatness. Three German translators had tried their luck and killed mercilessly one of my favorite poems....^99.

Coincidentally, the place of such common words happen to come at the end of quoted lines. This is a frequent occurence. It is due to the compulsion of rhyme which, while it coerces, invents. Of course, it may also abort.^100. But what is more important is the consideration that for a poet who was not insistent on pleasing modulation, such a feature as rhyme would be faithfully adhered to throughout his career.^101. For rhyme gives a strictness to verse, adores its own

97. W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand (New York: Random House, 1962), pp. 296-305.

98. These translations are literal in order to make the commentary at least somewhat accurate. By the same token they do not convey the flavor of the original. It was a most frustrating hunt for examples since, to my dismay, none of the common Dutch words were translatable. On the positive side this indicates quite early how gifted Vestdijk was and how intimate the knowledge of his own language. It furthermure belies the flippant assertion that Dutch is merely a garbled variety of platt Deutsch. Other, even more maddening, instances are: ‘Een taam'lijk vaag geklodderde arena: en niet alleen hun kaste bleef potdicht; Wanneer 'k van je schande hoorde vuilbekken; Maar nu en dan ziet men hun 'n leigrauw snoet’. And so on.

99. Hannah Ahrendt, ‘Reflections’, The New Yorker (January 20, 1975), p.39.

100. For instance the poem ‘Thorbeckeplein’ in Verzamelde Gedichten, I (Amsterdam-Den Haag: Athenaeum-Polak & Van Gennep, Bert Bakker, De Bezige Bij, Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 1971), p.205.

101. A rare instance of a poem written in free verse is the sequence ‘Ontmoetingen in het Vondelpark’ from the collection Simplicia in Verzameld Werk, I, pp. 393-396.

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echo, and bestrides verse groups like hoops around a barrel. It is precisely this quality of necessity that intrigued Vestdijk. Its heuristic effect anchors formulation in language's infinite possibility.^102. Wimsatt's appreciation of rhyme is identical to that of Vestdijk.

The words of a rhyme, with their curious harmony of sound and distinction of sense, are an amalgam of the sensory and the logical, or an arrest and precipitation of the logical in sensory form; they are the icon in which the idea is caught. Rhyme and other verse elements save the physical quality of words - intellectualized and made transparent by daily usage. But without the intellectual element there is nothing to save and no reason why the physical element of words need be asserted.^103.

But, as we saw, Vestdijk will not allow stasis. It is a well-known fact that rhyme can easily lead to monotony. Besides employing the more common usage of masculine, feminine and triple rhyme, rime riche, near rhyme, and so on,^104. Vestdijk tried other means to subvert to blockade that rhyme presses on verse units. The rebellion was primarily supported by enjambement and accent displacement.

The usage of enjambement is, of course, well known, but Vestdijk was particularly pleased with his formulation of what he called ‘blurring rhyme’, a deviation achieved by shifting the accent away from the final syllable.^105. If in line a the accent is on the final stress that initiates the rhyme, in line b the accent will be on the stress twice removed from or just before the rhyming word or syllable. Thus:

Onder de stam sneeuwt dagen lang
Wat zacht is als een kinderwang
En als een kleine schelp gevormd.

[Under the treetrunk snows for days / What is soft like the cheek of a child / And shaped like a small shell.

This example has the accent in the second line on kin and has the added advantage, for Vestdijk's purposes, of being run-on with the third line. Similarly:

Waar alle dorst bevroren is...
Plots een orkaan! Een hindernis
Van lucht! Een stoot, een handgeris
Aan kleren, luchtpijp, hoed en haar:
Een guur verweld'gend windgevaar.

[Where all thirst is frozen.../ Suddenly a hurricane! An obstacle / Of air! A shove, a grabbing of hands / At clothes, windpipe, hat and hair: / A raw and conquering danger of wind,]

102. De glanzende kiemcel, p. 83.

103. W.K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon, pp. 165-166.

104. Examples of other variations are:
crossed rhyme:

En niet meer terugkeert, geen wonder dat roekeloosheid
Onze dalen stoffeert als in vroeger en duisterder tijd.

identical rhyme:

De ziel in het nauw
Het tot zinkens bewaarde
Geneugen in 't nauw.

apocopated rhyme:

Vol roode wijn op de versierde tafel, -
Damast tot bloemen en kristal verkaveld, -

broken rhyme:

Waar het donderend water van ver
Echo's wekt, die dan her en dan der-
Waarts gezonden...

105. Vestdijk was proud of his discovery. He discusses it at length in De glanzende kiemcel, pp. 90-100, and, at an even earlier date, in an essay with the revealing title ‘A Scholarly Contribution to the Study of Rhythm’ (‘Wetenschappelijke bijdrage tot de ritmologie’) in De poolse ruiter (Den Haag: Bert Bakker-Daamen N.V., 1963), pp. 211-216.

[p. 26]

One can see its practical use for long stretches of rhymed verse. This ‘blurring’ of rhyme resembles somewhat what we call triple rhyme, but it is not easy to find in English. I hazard the reason for it as having to do with the fact that our language has so many monosyllabic rhymes as well as the presence of an abundance of polysyllabic words that have unaccented pre-or suffixes. Nevertheless, an example:

Always too eager for future, we
Pick up bad habits of expectancy.

(Philip Larkin)

Though, to take on the rest
Of the world at the drop of a hat or the mildest
Nudge of the impossible,

(Auden)

The theory and practice of ‘blurring’ rhyme is yet another instance of the remarkable consistency of Vestdijk's urge to dissolve even when in the process of demarcation.

Vestdijk's prosodic bias was towards syllabic verse,^106. a practice favored particularly by Marianne Moore in our own tongue, with a predilection to have stress accentuate the measure. Such a practice of combining the counting of syllables in a line with a rhythm provided by the emphasis of sense, is most congenial to verse that would think rather than sing. Our more familiar admixture of quantitative verse, derived from antiquity, and accentual prosody, is designed to reproduce sound more than idea. Hence it is again predictable that Vestdijk favored verse that employed sense stress because it ‘approached the irregular and unpredictable rhythm of prose.’^107.

Naturally he used the more traditional metres when it was asked for by the requirements of particular form, Prosodists can find, for instance, a wide spectrum of variety in the nine songs of the epic poem entitled Mnemosyne in de bergen (Mnemosyne in the Mountains). They can find stanzaic verse in the body of his poetry, as well as rondels, rondeaux, couplets, sestinas, a long narrative poem ‘De vliegende Hollander’ (‘The Flying Dutchman’), verse libretto (‘Merlijn’, ‘Merlyn’, intended to be set to music by the contemporary Dutch composer Willem Pijper), ballads, even an acrostichon. But the most persistent form is the sonnet which I calculate to be roughly over one third of Vestdijk's total poetic output, including several sonnet sequences, ‘De uiterste seconde’ (‘The ultimate second’), ‘Rondgang door het jaar’ (‘Tour of the year’), ‘Griekse Sonnetten’ (‘Greek Sonnets’), ‘Thanatos aan banden’ (Thanatos Bound’), and a formal sonnet cycle of 150 poems, ‘Madonna met de valken’ (‘Madonna with the Falcons’).

106. Compare De glanzende kiemcel, p.58.

107. Kiemcel, p.55.

[p. 27]

Similarly to his discovery of blurring rhyme is vestaijks use of imagery. It is rife with precise words in unusual juxtapositions, pressed into service either by hyperbolic correspondences or by the coincidence of rhyme. It is a usage contiguous with his prose style and his theoretical writings, since words that etch sharply serve to weigh the verse down in the world of common reality. They prevent signification from escaping into the incorporeality of abstract musings. Like floats holding the net in a specific area of the sea, they insure a fair catch of meaning where, otherwise, if they did not realize their weight, the net would flow away with the motion of the waves. Such diction can jar the reader into apprehending the conveyance of meaning much more so than, say, a vocabulary which exclusively holds with words of abstraction. It indicates Vestdijk's incredibly rich hoard of words and his graphic mind which could see all manner of analogies. All the indictments of cerebrality and objectivity forget to point to this basic realism. It is one of the reasons for his genius.

The diastole of thought alternates with the systole of concrete imagery. Such a manner is most appropriate for giving both lifeblood to abstraction and for enhancing pictures with thought. If ever Vestdijk preferred one to the exclusion of the other, it would have to be in his earlier poetry where there is a greater number of poems which are content to picture: cameos or crimshaw. The title of one such early volume sums it up: Berijmd Palet, i.e. a rhymed palette. In this first stage, roughly from his debut in 1932 to the Second World War, one will find a series of stills after artists (El Greco, Goya, Piranesi); snapshots from his youth (‘Jeugd’ [‘Youth], in Kind van stad en land [Child of Cirty and Country]; landscapes (‘sombere en ironische landschappen’ [‘Somber and Ironic landscapes’], being section V of Kind van Stad en Land); city scapes (section IV of Kind van Stad en Land or IV in Klimmende legenden [Twining Legends]; psychological summaries of historical figures (VI of Klimmende Legenden); miniatures of animals (III in Klimmende Legenden); miniatures of animals (III in Klimmende Legenden); ‘domestic arabesques’ (Simplicia), and so on. In these psychological pictures, Vestdijk was, in a sense, much more of a realist as a poet than as a novelist. In his fiction he was, concordia discors, the lyricist he disavowed in poetry.

Some samples at random. A small child between adults holds on to their hands as if holding on to ‘straps’ in a subway (‘handenlussen,’ I, p. 159);^* a salamander's cool skin is like a ‘rubber coat’ (‘gummimantel,’ I, p.378); a beard which hides a weak chin is like the ‘roof of a shed’ (‘afdak’, I, p.381); an oyster leers like a ‘banker with a greay coat on’ (‘grijsgejast bankier,’ I, p. 382); an aging father who has to admit to a tenderness for his son is likened to an old mountain who is forced to allow a grotto of stalactites in his formation (I, p.325). In a poem about le Roi Soleil, Vestdijk concentrates on the king's constipation so that, by analogy, his privy becomes the worst cliff that the ship of state has to circumvent (I, p. 321). Fertility, the worst enemy for sophisticated lovers, is unceremoniously plopped into a description of the Garden of Love in the traditional shape of a rabbit, but described as a ‘clump with two spoons’ (‘klomp met twee lepels’, I 304), where the word ‘klomp’ can mean both ‘wooden shoe’ and

* Page references to the collected poems in 3 volumes.

[p. 28]

‘clump’. In the same poem, which should have a tone of elegance, decorum, or, at least, traditional eroticism, we find a ‘lapclimbing nobleman’ (‘schootbeklimmend edelman’) who wants to enter love's heaven by ‘imitating a Piéta (‘door een Piëta na te bootsen’). Aged female prisoners who are being led away as prisoners from a conquered city, are so emeciated that their breastbones have ‘climbed up over their hungry breastfolds’ (‘opgeklommen/Over hun hongerige borstenvouwen,’ I, p.297). Or, finally, the hackneyed image of Zeus visiting Danae in a shower of gold, is described as follows: ‘The god bent over, searched for her by touch / Flower escorting flower for copulation / And burst as pollen in her dark closet’ (II, p.109).

De god boog over, zocht haar op de tast,
Bloem die een bloem ter paring vergezelde,
En barste als stuifmeel in haar donk're kast.

But such concrete power of metaphor can also go awry. The revulsion of Judas' kiss is conveyed by an unfortunately sustained comparison to marine life: where a jaw becomes a rock beneath the sea to which clings the mouth like a ‘juicy mollusc’,^108. and the whole intention gets washed away as nonsense. Two other examples display his failure when Vestdijk falls prey to ventric loquacity. In a personal mythology (I, p.254) stomachs ‘float like seafruits’ and are then apostrophized as ‘there is no god like stomach swarming’ (‘er is geen god dan 't buikgewemel’) - a deification that makes this reader beg for plain mortality. In a sonnet from the cycle Madonna with the Falcons (Madonna met de Valken, II, p.258), a bit of alcoholic bravura can not handle the sobriety of realism. Wine ‘bubbles up’ the throat, even ‘bubbles along’ when the singer repeats a refrain. And colloquialism becomes boorish when the wine asks the stomach if his ‘warm walls belong to that fool’ who ‘dares to sing with his gullet’.^109.

Such an idiosyncratic mixture of the artful and the mundane kept within strictly formal outlines, elicits a modern, syncopated effect.^110. In this manner a poem can move from the conversational to apostrophe while - despite the illustrated hazards of such usage - preventing a disappearance into rarifaction. That is to say that Vestdijk, despite his superior intellect and speculative mind, could not write lines as the following from Wallace Stevens' ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Heaven’:

In the perpetual reference, object
Of the perpetual meditation, point
Of the enduring, visionary love,

Obscure, in colors whether of the sun
Or mind, uncertain in the clearest bells,
The spirit's speeches, the indefinite,

Confused illuminations and sonorities,
So much ourselces, we cannot tell apart
The idea and the bearer-being of the idea.

108. In the original weekdier because week en dier (adjective and noun) can be separated and maintain their individual meanings of ‘weak’ in a derogatory sense and ‘animal’.

109. In Dutch ‘gullet’ is slokdarm and sounds even funnier.

110. Compare Vestdijk's critical reflections on this very modern practice in his essay on Nijhoff, ‘Hedendaags Byzantisme’ in De poolse ruiter, pp. 169-170.

[p. 29]

This might be intellectual but it is not poetry. For the latter is a queen who, no matter how regal, knows the secrets of make-up.

As we argued before, the addition of detail does not necessarily equal precision. The following poem purports to be nothing more than a description of Amsterdam (I, p. 203).

Gevoegd tot wallen steen, en krom verdronken,
Staan de kantoren in hun lang plantsoen.
Te lang, te smal... Op bruggeranden ronken
Tramwagens dwars door 't stoffig dubbelgroen.

[Fitted to walls of stone, and crookedly drowned, / The offices stand in their long garden. / Too long, too narrow... On the edges of bridges drone / Streetcars right through the dusty green.]

Nog stroomt een rest van 't kruislingsch labyrinth
Waar men 't verleden moeizaam in kan halen
Als spook'ge achterstevens, vluchtend bint
Van schepen die de reeders lieten dwalen.

[There still flows a remainder of the crossed labyrinth / Where one can overtake the past with difficulty / Like ghostly sterns, fleeing tie-beams / Of ships which the owners allowed to roam.]

Maar in die duizeldun vertakte haven
Zijn zelfs de geesten zo misteekend, dat
He laatste toplicht, wezenloos hoogdravend,
Zweeft als een lichtreclame op de binnenstad.

[But in that dizzyingly thin ramified harbor / Even the spirits are so badly drawn, that / The last masttop's light, vacantly pompous, / Floats as a neon sign on top of the inner city.]

We note the precise denotations which, however, effect to escape their task. That buildings can be ‘drowned’ in a city where, because of heavy traffic, dwellings sink beneath the level of the street, is precise; the addition of ‘crookedly’ makes it inimitable because they have settled down as well as askew. But streetcars droning on the ‘edges’ of bridges begins to be less substantial (perhaps a reference to the vibrations of heavy traffic in the handrails of the bridges?), while ‘doublegreen’ is quite puzzling. One green can be attributed to trees dusty from traffic, but what is the second one? Perhaps an allusion to their image cast back from the windows in the streetcars - a sort of redoublement de vert, as it were? In any case, what looks so convincingly assured is only enhanced by the erasure of precision.

The second quatrain exacts such fleeting. The allusion is to Amsterdam's harbor, the IJ, which, once a major port, is no longer important. The poem retreats to another age, to the 17th century of sailing ships with their rigging and

[p. 30]

masts. But from the perspective of our day and age, these marine presences are like ghostships. They are knowledgeably detailed: tie-beams, sterns. The host of masts on moored ships are a ‘crossed labyrinth’, reminiscent of Baudelaire's ‘forêts de mâts’ he liked to imagine in Holland, that nostalgic ‘pays de Cocagne’ he never saw but sang about in the prose poems ‘L'Invitation au Voyage’ and ‘N'Importe ou hors du monde’. These ships were built by the negligent ‘owners’ of the last line, which echoes the ‘offices’ of the first quatrain, for it was these merchants and their riches who built the stately houses (now mostly office buildings) in the old city of Amsterdam.

The third quatrain reiterates the ethereal harbor of the past (‘dizzingly thin ramified’) and associates it with a pitiful spookiness. Geesten can mean here both the spirits of the ships as well as those of the dead. Note here also the very subtle etching of masts in the second quatrain. As a visual perspective they are finely drawn, but this only increases their insubstantiality. ‘Ramified’ (the Dutch vertakte is clearer) echoes the cliché without using it. These spookships are sorry from having been ill drawn and from the fact that their illumination is both unreal as well as pointless (for wezenloos can mean ‘vacant’ as well as ‘unreal’ or ‘unconscious’). The irreality is finalized in the image that bridges past and present, connects the two last quatrains with the modern picture of the first: when an antique light is now a crude advertisement.

Apparently static, the picture is really vibrant in a hushed tone: it depicts a ghosttown of activity. Objects float like careful shadows - a ‘fleeting tie-beam’. The bustling, warm capital of Holland has been transformed into an eery nocturne.^111.

The varieties of Vestdijk's prewar poetry gives way to more contemplative verse, without losing the plasticity that marked the earlier gallery of psychological pictures. With the poetry written during his incarceration, Vestdijk turns to fundamental questions of death, religion and time. Roughly from 1942 on. While the earlier volumes could still be illustrative of his ‘fourth type of poetry’ the latter volumes are decidedly more significative verse and are dominated by the form of the sonnet.

This ‘fourth type’ is Vestdijk's addition to the traditional triad of lyrical, epic and didactic poetry; it is the poetry of plasticity. And Vestdijk's subheadings are a good nomenclature for his own work at that stage: the phantastically plastic or the psychologically plastic.^112. The general notion of the ‘fourth type’ may be compared to Pound's ‘imagism’, while the subheadings would cover the work of Benn and Plath for the first one while that of Auden would illustrate the second.

It is not that such plasticity was now subordinated to content. The later stages of Vestdijk's more reflective verse were shaped by the practice he had so well rehearsed in the beginning, while the poetry of plasticity was never devoid of thought. The psychology, as a matter of fact, remains in both. But one can definitely discern a change in the poetry written after the epic (or narrative) poem ‘De Vliegende Hollander’ (‘The Flying Dutchman’, published in 1941). Only in a commissioned collection about Rembrandt, ‘Rembrandt en de engelen’ (‘Rembrandt and the Angels’, published in 1956), and in the result of a specific invitation to write a libretto for an opera (‘Merlijn’, published in 1957), is there

111. In the original are some instances of inspired rhyming. Plantoen (garden) rhymes with groen (green); but the real find was to match labyrinth with bint (tie-beam, singular as well as plural), so that a labyrinth van bint would mean the same as a vertakte haven.

112. De glanzende kiemcel, p.203.

[p. 31]

a demonstrable return to former modes. Other major collections as De Uiterste Seconde (The Ultimate Second, published in 1944), Thanatos aan Banden (Thanatos Bound, published in 1948), Gestelsche Liederen (Songs from Gestel, published in 1949), attempt to shape answers to the fundamental questions of existence. They are reflective verse which signify a development of mental processes - Vestdijk's mode of ‘significative’ verse which ‘determines realities.’^113.

In the light of our previous discussion it will be no surprise that such poems do not prescribe. Significative verse was never a didactic mode for Vestdijk. Poetry's indirect communication remains paramount. Nor does the previous paragraph imply that, in his later work, the greater incidence of reflection lapsed into flannel jargon. Vestdijk was too much the poet for that. And a poet, as we have seen, is too much of a realist - despite his protestations.

For example, the cycle of ‘Greek Sonnets’ in Gestelsche Liederen (Songs from Gestel) is replete with plastic metaphors. At one point Vestdijk depicts the vessel of the Danaids, after they have died (for ‘even in hell one dies’), as lying abandoned and rusted solid. This utterly domestic detail of a sieve stopped-up from the labor it was designed for, lends an irreal subversion to the moribund tale. Hades is quiet and deserted. The river Acheron ‘meets himself’ again after he had been emptied, bucket by bucket, by the unceasing labor of the condemned sisters. Futility becomes even more painfully sinister when the poet mentions a shadow, in this realm ‘a shade of a shade’, who in the ‘shy light of dusk’ fills the vessel which no longer ‘will let anything through’ (II, p.105)

Vestdijk's work has a filiferous genius, of making fray even more threadbare, that is quite unsettling. It can augment insubstantiality, as we saw in the Amsterdam poem, or here, in the shades of Hades, or it can take the form of a more abstract elasticity, a liquification of the mind. We will return to this peculiar quality in cumulative stages because it is a feature, in various guises, of Vestdijk's thought, imagery and style.

In conclusion some samples from this final phase where this ability to shape the imponderable is directed at an interrogation of death. At first there is an agonizing with God which has overtones of a previously aggressive bond between father and son (‘Baardmensch’ [‘Beardman], I, p.381; ‘Vader en Zoon’ [‘Father and Son’], I, p.325) reflected in the impotent fury of the child against the adult (‘Huiselijke Arabesken’ [‘Domestic Arabesques], I, pp. 385-390, an emotion amplified in isolation (‘De Meid’ [‘The Maid’], I, p. 164; ‘Visite’ [‘Visitors’], I, p.161; ‘Het kind en de stervende zeeanemoon’ [‘The child and the dying sea-anemone’], I, p.160; ‘De oude gang’ [‘The old corridor’], I, p.159). This connection is stated with atypical directness in the section ‘Vader en Zoon’ (‘Father and Son’) in Gestelsche Liederen (Songs from Gestel, II, pp. 145-164). There is no doubt of the son's hatred. The father is a man who failed to understand (II, p.145), who refuses to give directions to his ‘refrain’ but will not let him do what he (uncertainly) wants either (II, p.146-48): this man becomes the victim of the son in a night lit by a malefic moon (II, pp.149-51). But there is also a painful admission of defeat in the suggestion that father and son are mirrors which cast each other's reflection back and forth as if in a troubled dream, so that the ‘hatred’ with which the child kisses his father's eyes, may well

113. Kiemcel, p.132.

[p. 32]

be visited upon the son (II, p.151). Yet such shrill hatred still charges a most un-Goethean ‘homunculus’ to be a parricide, even though he ‘wasn't born’ (II, p.154).

Filial defiance is soon amplified into the poet's defiance of God the Father. In a virulence that is unmatched in his work, Vestdijk, in ‘De Ballade van het Vierde Kruis’ (‘The Ballad of the Fourth Cross’, II, pp. 155-6), prosecutes the father as a God of Cowardice. Although God created this world and its attendant miseries, particularly mankind, He had ‘Another’ suffer for the sins which He was, after all, responsible for. It is a double indignity. Not only was such an affair a ‘circuitous’ way of doing things, but it is also cowardice because ‘You never hung on the cross’. The poet would launch a new Ascension for the sole purpose of attacking God. But he knows that Christ is too gentle for such a rematch. In the final stanza, the two strains (one psychological and one intellectual) meet in a vehement outcry. The tortured man who curses God for his existence as well as the honest mind that can only see deceit in the Passion, spurred on by the son who cannot obliterate himself as an image of his father, combine in a bitter challenge: ‘Your best defense is that You do not exist / And You therefore do not need to fear me either. / But fear me yet, You who I allow to live, / For like a bloodhound I follow all Your trails, / And make myself eternally responsible for that shame: / You yourself never hung on the cross!’

Uw best verweer is dat Gij niet bestaat
En dat Gij mij dus ook niet hebt te vreezen.
Maar vrees mij tóch maar, Gij die 'k leven laat,
Want als een bloedhond volg ik al Uw gangen,
En maak mij eeuwig schuldig aan die smaad:
Zelf hebt Gij nimmer aan het kruis gehangen!

Technically the poem cannot compete with his other work, but the theme and the uncommon ferocity of its expression is important.^114. It is an agnostic duel rather than a statement of atheism and its resolution occupied Vestdijk for the extent of his life. The most complete denial of religion was formulated in his philosophical text De Toekomst der Religie (The Future of Religion, published in 1947), while it was also pursued in such novels as Bericht uit het hiernamaals (Message from the Beyond, published in 1964) and De kellner en de levenden (The Waiter and the Living, published in 1949).

In the poetry the aggression is stilled in an understanding of the human father, a healing process that is necessary for a healthy development. The unbearable identification with Christian icons is shucked and is then reidentified as being a separate problem. While the father and his living ‘refrain’ can be resolved in a melancholy song, the religious dichotomy turns into a metaphysical probing of mortality.

114. I am well aware that such poems (which rhyme a critical interpretation of Christianity) were once a common mode. The work of Lord Rochester has an apt example. But note that the tone, even in such a disrespectful poet as Rochester, is much less virulent.

Supreme first causes! you, whence all things flow,
Whose infiniteness does each little fill,
You, who decree each seeming chance below,
(So great in power) were you as good in will,
How could you ever have produc'd such ill?

Had your eternal mind been bent to good,
Could human happiness have prov'd so lame?
Rapine, revenge, injustice, thirst of blood,
Grief, anguish, horror, want, despair and shame,
Had never found a being nor a name.

'Tis therefore less impiety to say,
Evil with you has coeternity
Than blindly taking it the other way,
That merciful and of election free,
You did create the mischiefs you foresee.

Quoted in Graham Greene, Lord Rochester's Monkey (London:
Bodley Head, 1974), p.204. A most curious resemblance can be seen in a poem by Dorothy Sayers which is at times very close to Vestdijk's effort.

Go, bitter Christ, grim Christ! haul if Thou wilt
The bloody Cross to Thine own bleak Calvary!
When did I bid Thee suffer for my guilt?
To bind intolerable claims on me?
I loathe Thy sacrifice; I am sick of Thee.

Janet Hitchman, Such a Strange Lady (London: New English Library, 1975), p.151.

The Ultimate Second

Doodgaan is de kunst om levende beelden

[p. 33]

 

Met evenveel gelatenheid te dulden

 

Als toen zij nog hun rol in 't leven speelden,

 

Ons soms verveelden, en nochtans vervulden.

[To die is the art of living images / To endure with equal resignation / As when they still played their role in life, / Bored us sometimes, and nevertheless fulfilled.]

Hier stond ons huis; hier liep zij met de honden;
Hier maakte zij de bruine halsband los;
Hier hebben wij de stinkzwammen gevonden,
Op een beschutte plek in 't sparrenbosch.

[Here stood our house; here she walked with the dogs; / Here she loosened the brown collar; / Here we found the stinkhorns, / In a sheltered spot in the fir forest.]

Doodgaan is niet de aangrijpende gedachte,
Dat zij voortaan alleen die paden gaat, -
Want niemand is alleen die af kan wachten,
En niemand treurt die wandelt langs de straat, -

[To die is not the moving thought, / That from now on she will walk those paths alone, - / Because no one is alone who can wait, / And no one grieves who is walking along the street, -]

Maar dat dit alles wàs: een werk'lijkheid,
Die duren zal tot de uiterste seconde;
Dit is de ware wedloop met de tijd:
De halsband los, en zij met de twee honden.

[But that all of this has been: a reality, / Which shall last until the ultimate second; / This is the true race with time: / The collar loose, and she with the two dogs.]

This poem, entitled ‘De uiterste seconde’ (‘The Ultimate Second’), is one of Vestdijk's finest efforts. It blots all theory and fades before the inquiring mind. Very much significative poetry, decidedly establishing by indirection, it is nevertheless precise in diction and detail. It appears to provide a sort of answer to Vestdijk's eschatology, though trying to capture it makes one feel like an arthritic lepidopterist.

First of all, it is a fine example of Vestdijk's smooth technique. The poem is build from traditional quatrains rhymed abab, cdcd, efef, gcgc, in iambic pentameter. There is an example of ‘blurring’ in the second stanza (lines 2 and 4), and the poem also shows Vestdijk's inclination to mix colloquial with poetic language. Yet the poem is much more quiet than his previous work. No wrenched metaphors or excessive juxtapositions. The eloquence is serene and

[p. 34]

assured, and the reader senses the poet's assurance.^115.

The subject is death and the theme, as one critic stated, is the borderline of life and death.^116. But one can think of alternatives. A more intimate acquaintance with Vestdijk's work might argue for memory's dominion, while the dedication to a woman might suggest an elegy about the termination of a relationship.^117. The former is integral in the weaving, while the latter is unsatisfactory since it excludes too much. A critical excursus might bring the following illuminations, though not necessarily enlightenment.

The first word clearly denotes the theme: dying. The choice of words is significant since in Dutch, doodgaan is very colloquial (the exptected synonym is sterven), thereby lending the experience commonality. Furthermore, the verbal aspect of the compound (- gaan = to go) predicates continuity, a metaphysical copula from one existence to another. For nowhere in the poem does the reader feel death's finality. The act of mortality is an acquired craft (an ‘art’), a statement, however, that is immediately qualified. For this first stanza is an unsettling one which reduplicates antithesis. One might call it a phrasing of oxymoronic syntax. Dying is an art; art means depiction which, by definition, is still lives, yet here such lives live (the original is a present participle). The fleeing definition continues to elude in lines two and three - the only run-on lines in the entire poem - when the living images should be endured with the same equanimity as when they were experienced when we were still alive. But even then they were agents of duplicity, as one can ascertain from the oxymoron of the fourth line. The definitive tone of the beginning is most certainly a dubious achievement. In fact, the meaning is even more disquieting for the temporal indicators (toen and nog and the past tense of the verb) assume a completion. Where is the poet situated? Is he on our side or on the other side of the border which demarcates the country from which no return should be possible? Is this a lesson from the beyond? For the narrator speaks as if he has experienced dying and he seems to imply that he has seen the ‘images’ in a lived life. One gets the presentiment of perpetuity here that one finds in Greek myths of the underworld or in Dante's limbo: a deathless dying.

Nor are the ‘images’ very consoling. They are the only things that ‘live’ in the quatrain and it would seem they are inflicted on us in a manner quite unlike the servility a robust Berkeleyean perspective would allow. The second quatrain selects some. They appear quite harmless and charmingly domestic, conjugations of a passive past. A house shared; a familiar woman walking the dogs and letting them run; a more specific detail of shared activity. Except that these images are chosen to the exclusion of a host of possibilities. The realistic detail in such a craftsman as Vestdijk has other indications. Why fungi? One could, of course, be satisfied with the explanation that the couple were ardent mycologists. But wouldn't picking flowers be a happier memory? The Dutch specification refers to the genus Phallus so called for their appearance, which, as the Dutch dictionary says, spread ‘an odor of carrion’. A smaller variety of these fungi, found in Holland, is called mutinus caninus or ‘dog's phallus’. Fungi thrive on dead matter in the shape of a sinister eroticism, though nothing else is erotic in the text. But these plants, no matter how ambivalently symbolic, are linked to the dogs.

115. A Dutch critic, als noticed this progressive certainty in Vestdijk's verse. Max Nord, ‘De duizendvoudige tond’, in Over S. Vestdijk, ed. Max Nord (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, n.d.) p.46.

116. H.U. Jessurun d'Oliveira, ‘De halsband los’, in Vondsten en Bevindingen (Amsterdam: Polak & Van Gennep, 1967), p.121.

117. The poem is dedicated to ‘Ans’. Knowing that this was Vestdijk's commonlaw wife does not significantly increase perspicacity.

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These domestic animals form a conspicuous presence. They even picture the meaning of dying in the last line of the poem. I do not agree with the critic who says that they are merely attributes of the woman or that they symbolize the human couple.^118. Vestdijk was fond of these animals. True, the dog can be the ancient symbol of fidelity (in Homer's Odyssee for instance) but then he is for Vestdijk a rival with the woman for the master's affection (II, p.327, p. 377). Or the dog can be a personal symbol for pure duration that does not know the conjugations of time, when he becomes an enviable symbol of pure being, for example in Vestdijk's dialogue on time, The Eternal Too Late (Het eeuwige telaat). Yet Vestdijk was also perfectly aware of the dog's chthonic symbolism, for example in ‘Het Witte Kasteel’ (‘The White Castle’, II, p.327) or the Greek sonnet ‘De Roof van Kerberos’ (‘The Theft of Cerberus’, II, p.119). The chthonic canine was already present in Egypt as Anubis, the companion of Thoth, and in Greek myth, Cerberus guards the Underworld. In Northern myth the damned were pursued to Hell by a pack of hounds. Hecate, goddess of the Greek underworld, is pictured as having the head of a dog and when she roams around at night she is accompanied by ghosts and dogs. ‘She was even called Bitch and She-Wolf’, notes Kerényi. The reduplication of Hecate (in some myths her daughter) is Skylla, the marine monster with the waist of a dog. And as the goddess of crossroads, dogs were sacrificed to her.^119. In Romeo and Juliet Hecate is Mercurio's Queen Mab who troubles dreams and portends death (I, iv, 54-111).

Hence we clearly have a set of symbols for death. Chthonic dogs; plants which are popularly associated with death and are fearfully, yet strangely alive. And the designation of a sheltered spot in a fir forest carries the suggestion of something sacred, both in its suggestion of a dell, a favored spot, and the tree which was holy in Occidental mythology. Finally the color brown (the only color ever mentioned) is the color of grief and of renunciation of the world (vide: monks' habits).

And this dying is peculiar for the associations, normaliter of grief, are here negatively turned positive in the third quatrain. Being alone implies waiting; one assumes that this must carry the meaning of hope. But what that should achieve is not clear and faintly sinister. This quatrain has something of a covert motion, yet it is not very lively since the motility is captured in negatives. In fact, the feminine pronoun becomes somewhat spectral with the repetition of ‘no one’ and the whole quatrain is dematerialized by its antecedent: ‘thought’.

Elsewhere death is for Vestdijk the ‘vision of what-once-was-shall-be’ (‘Gebed’ [‘Prayer’] III, p. 367), a description which emphasizes its origin in a mode of contemplation that is a persistent reality. The end-stopped first line gives almost the shape of a definition to this paradox. We experience a peculiar temporal simultaneity in that something that is past is a reality which will endure to an ultimate second - hence is not finished yet. This indeed would be a ‘true race with time’, having in effect something of the running to stay in place of Alice and the Red Queen. And what exhausted Alice would be a favored dalliance for Vestdijk. For the Dutch poet wanted to conquer time for he, like most of us, did not want to die. Our dying is morbid in that it leaves behind, while the poet

118. H.U. Jessurun d'Oliveira, Vondsten en Bevindingen, p.134.

119. The statement is based on: Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (New York: Braziller, 1959), pp.120-124; C.G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962), pp. 370-371; C. Kerényi, The Gods of the Greeks (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books Inc., 1958), p.32.

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would have the now always. But the now, in the act of knowing, is past. Sequentially, the next act obliterates the preceding one and in so doing accords the former a blessedness which, perhaps, it did not have at inception.

Such an attempt to conquer time is a melancholy one - one of transitoriness. For Vestdijk, as he revealingly stated it in a little essay on his friend and fellow poet Roland Holst, for Vestdijk it was decay, lapse, time's extinguishing.^120. The original word is more graphic: ontluistering - the taking away of lustre. In the same essay such extinguishing is said to be axiomatic for our existence and it is experienced by the poet as a hindrance, indeed, is nothing less than an inhuman disgrace: the poet ‘protests against it, he seeks ways to escape it.’^121. The point is to experience the past as a now. This has a familiair ring to it: poetry as a retrograde activity, Vestdijk's adoration of Proust, poetry as an act of isolation.

Now we can modify the preceding somewhat. What is to be achieved is the ‘what-once-was-shall-be’, which has been done here by the ‘living images’. Hence, to die is ‘not the moving thought’ of the present active mood when the moment is in the process of being experienced. But to die, as a present participle, is when the poet is still in charge of his faculties, still experiences the reality of the past as a reality, in a continuum of epiphanies. A process: doodgaan. For when life, that is to say anyone who does the experiencing, is indubitably past, it is so only when the radar has been extinguished. Hence the emphasis on the ‘ultimate second’ since, up till that final splinter of consciousness, the poet has triumphed over time by stilling it and, as in the medium of film, has animated the stills into an illusion of activity. Such preemptive immortality is achieved only in language. Time can be stopped by grammatical transformations. As Einstein wrote a month before his death: ‘The separation between past, present, and future has only the meaning of an illusion, albeit a tenacious one.’^122. ‘Was’ is a reality, and it shall last, but only up to that penultimate of time, which equals the ‘reservation’ in the following remark on his friend: ‘There is in Holst always a final reservation of throwing oneself into infinity, into the absolute.’^123.

The true race with time is preserving presentness which can only be done via a consciousness. Let's say this can be done, and, of course, poetry can do this, but it is nevertheless ultimately a failure and can only run its course until the consciousness which exulted in its trapping of time is taken by death. For this reason, it would seem to me, did Vestdijk choose the mundane poetic usage of wedloop or race with time. The dogs become the emblems of that race: their collar is opened, one expects them to run, yet they're still with the woman. A picture of incipience, a frozen still to be held in the mind for as long as a breath is drawn. The poet won, knowing he will lose. Except for the ‘living image’ of his poem. The ultimate loss, and the ultimate cruelty, is, perhaps, unconsciously manifested in the ‘pictures’ which Vestdijk choose for representation. They are, as was pointed out before, all images of death. Hecate with her hounds haunts life.

The discussion illustrated the contention that Vestdijk's poetry never achieves by efficiency. It is, as one critic, pointed out, an assemblage of ‘concentric circles’ which never reach a goal.^124. In other words, the poem connotes by indirection - which is precisely what Vestdijk intended to practice. When poetry

120. ‘Dichter van het bovenzinlijke’, in Zuiverende kroniek (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1956), p.192.

121. Zuiverende kroniek, p.193. Italics added.

122. Roman Jakobson, ‘Verbal Communication’, Scientific American, 227, no. 3 (september 1972), p.80.

123. Zuiverende kroniek, p.194.

124. Max Nord, ‘De duizendvoudige tong’, in Over S. Vestdijk, ed. Max Nord (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, n.d.), p.39.

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is dividend into two types - direct and oblique - then Vestdijk is decidedly both a poet of the latter variety and its critical apologist. Tillyard's description of oblique poetry is most appropriate to Vestdijk's practice, and is contiguous with his theory:

The main sense is stated in no particular whatever, but is diffused through every part of the poem and can be apprehended as a whole only through the synthesis of all those parts. The abstract idea, far from being stated, has been translated into completely concrete form; it has disappeared into apparently alien facts.^125.

Vestdijk formulated similar insights about a contemporary poet whose ‘sensualasensual figures are always envisioned very concretely yet meant very abstractly... They have precise delineations but have no clarifying conceptual content; they are, so to speak, surrounded [sic] by logic, their secret is condensed by central pressures into an impression of a (once living) fossil in chalk or sandstone.’^126.

Have we finally circumscribed the persistent attraction of a linguistic mode of knowledge that can convey the unutterable in utterance? What troubles poets is content, not form, unless one likes to trap oneself in anarchic license. When the ancient poet called upon the Muse he did not ask for a form, but wanted to know what content the goddess would make him privy to.^127. Whereas in ordinary life we separate the cognitive from the intuitive modes of communication, it is, in fact, in the act of poetry that the original act of language is preserved: nomenclature based on sensual experience that can be an analogue for concepts. Nominantur singularia sed universalia significantur. [Particulars are named but universals are signified] (John of Salisbury).

Where fictive prose would ask for a further approximation of precision, poetry can by contraction expand. Vestdijk's notion of isolation can be a consolation. I therefore object to a persistent judgment among his critics that Vestdijk's poems were forestudies for the larger canvasses of the novels and philosophical texts. Such a diminution is hardly consistent with the practice illustrated previously. Indeed, I would venture the suggestion that his poems were escape vents for the tension which sustained his longer works. When fiction like a surveyer kept on plotting distances, poetry could mine a vertical implosion. Mining demands sturdy construction before subterranean profit can be exploited. There is a pause in delving, while the prospector must keep on exploring possibilities. In an interview Vestdijk clearly indicated this sense of deliverance that poetry can give. ‘Poetry is something that, as I said, is connected with isolation, separation - a form of creative concentration which enables us to deliver something complete very quickly without its maker being stuck with the continuation of the literary process, I mean prose, which demands time and patience.’^128.

Such a feeling of security is reflected in his extraordinary facility. Writing poems can be a supreme form of keeping a metaphysical diary. Goethe confessed as much to Eckermann. For, as Goethe tried to teach his prosaic admirer, one should immediately grasp and transpose what is unique in an experience or

125. E.M.W. Tillyard, Poetry Direct and Oblique (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959), p.15.

126. ‘Hedendaags Byzantisme’, in De poolse ruiter (Den Haag: Bert Bakker-Daamen N.V., 1963), p.160. This is also applicable to Vestdijk's usage of rhyme as it was described with the aid of Wimsatt's theory on p.50, as well as to Tillyard's description of rhythm as a means towards obliqueness: Poetry Direct and Oblique, p.58.

127. Cf. E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), p.80.

128. Theun de Vries, Hernomen konfrontatie met S. Vestdijk (Amsterdam: De Arbeiderspers, 1968), p.60.

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detail. The particular has resonance because there is nothing in the world that existed only once.’^129. Vestdijk gave an extended illustration of this principle in his final lecture on poetry to his fellow hostages (De glanzende kiemcel. To give a practical finale to his discourse, Vestdijk proceeded to present his audience with a demonstration of the art of writing sonnets. The occassion for the poem - which is also what Goethe meant - was the visual discovery that, with the denuding of branches in autumn, the expanded horizon discovered towers.^130. Such a realistic detail becomes an epiphany; mundanity informs the spirit; the poet acts intermediary between the firm planting on soil and the helix of spaces. No matter how lofty his intentions, the poet begins with the world. In the most profound sense, poetry is nothing less than occasional verse.

Die Welt ist so gross und reich und das Leben so mannigfaltig, dass es an Anlässen zu Gedichten nie fehlen wird. Aber es müssen alles Gelegenheits gedichte sein, dass heisst, die Wirklichkeit muss die Veranlassung und den Stoff dazu hergeben. Allgemein und poetisch wird ein spezieller Fall eben dadurch, dass ihn der Dichter behandelt. Alle meine Gedichte sind Gelegenheitsgedichte, sie sind durch die Wirklichkeit angeregt und haben darin Grund und Boden. Von Gedichten, aus der Luft gegriffen, halte ich nichts.^131.

Vestdijk would agree with the wisdom that is hidden in Goethe's humility. All of his work is firmly anchored in reality and it is the transmutation by the poet which renders it significant.

Vestdijk admired this same factor of perplexing simplicity in his favorite painter, Rembrandt. In a short yet subtle text he tried to pinpoint the disturbing quality of Rembrandt's depiction of ‘The Polish Horseman’. A dashing young man with an air of jovial impertinence sits astride a nag of a horse. The poor beast appears to be stumbling towards the glue factory. Compared to its sorry shape and dirty white, its rider is virtually ablaze with color and health. The canvas is a most puzzling contradiction even though it is painted with precise detail.

And so stumbles the horse of the Polish rider - falling forward, with shaking knees, weaving as if it were walking under water, hankering after the knacker - across the painting from left to right, like an intimate mystery. If one looks down from the top, then the romanticism of the youth fades to an alarming degree, as if there was after all mention of one creature, whose lower half has become necrotic: blooming youth on top of a mummy, a branch with green that sprouted from the dreary death of a moldered treestump. The young man looks the viewer straight in the eye in such a friendly and happy fashion; one can see him hop up and down on this white bag of bones which couldn 't possibly bounce itself; he sits with his fist on his hip, he has a fur cap on, and a quiver, such a true Polish horseman! - but he does not know where the horse is going to lead him!... Due to a probable misunderstanding - one of those misunderstandings without which, from our point of view, great art cannot truly thrive - the journey of this ungreek centaur unquestionably assumes symbolic overtones. It is a man who knows himself delivered to the impossible and yet persists; it is the soul imprisoned in the body, beauty

129. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gespräche mit Goethe, ed. Johann Peter Eckermann (Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag, 1955), p. 57.

130. De glanzende kiemcel, p.249.

131. Goethe, Gespräche mit Goethe, p.44.

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which cannot do without ugliness, perfect harmony that hankers after chaos. There is a tragic note of ruin in this painting: the young man is so guileless, the horse so feeble. In all probability he isn't going to get very far after all...^132.

Vestdijk's apostrophe to Rembrandt's genius, at once so humane yet so sadly perceptive, is an apt correlative to his own artistry and significance.

132. De poolse ruiter, pp. 258-259.

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Chronology of Vestdijk's most important texts for his poetic theory

1932	wrote ‘Over de dichteres Emily Dickenson’ (cf. Lier en Lancet I)
1933	wrote ‘Bij een gedicht van E.A. Robinson’ (cf. Lier en Lancet I)
1934-1940	wrote ‘Prolegomena ener esthetiek’ (cf. Poolse Ruiter)
1935-1940	wrote ‘Hedendaags Byzantisme’ (cf. Poolse Ruiter)
1935-1940	wrote the essays published in Muiterij tegen het etmaal II
1937-1938	wrote ‘Rilke als barokkunstenaar’ (cf. Lier en Lancet I)
1939	original publication of Lier en Lancet (republished in 1960-61).
1940	wrote ‘Het lyrische beginsel bij Boutens (cf. Muiterij II) wrote ‘H. Marsman als Apollinische persoonlijkheid’ (cfs. Poolse Ruiter)

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	published Albert Verwey en de Idee
1942-1943	wrote the essays published in Essays in Duodecimo
1943	wrote the lectures published in De glanzende kiemcel
1945-1953	wrote the essays published in Zuiverende kroniek
1946	published in De Poolse Ruiter
1947	published Muiterij tegen het etmaal, II
1950	published De glanzende kiemcel
1952	published Essays in duodecimo
1956	published Zuiverende kroniek
1956-1959	wrote the esaays published in Voor en na de explosie
1960	published Voor en na de explosie.

Sources by Vestdijk

Albert Verwey en de Idee. 2nd. ed. Amsterdam: Polak & Van Gennep, 1965.

Essays in Duodecimo. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1952.

Gestalten tegenover mij. Persoonlijke herinneringen. Den Haag: Bert Bakker-Daamen N.V., 1961.

De glanzende kiemcel; beschouwingen ove;poëzie. 1950. rpt. Amsterdam: De Driehoek, 1969.

Lier en Lancet. Volume I. 2nd ed. 's-Gravenhage-Rotterdam: Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 1960.

Lier en Lancet. Volume II. 2nd. ed. 's-Gravenhage-Rotterdam: Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 1961.

Muiterij tegen het etmaal. Volume 2. Poëzie en essay. 2nd. ed. Den Haag: Bert Bakker-Daamen, N.V., 1966.

De Poolse Ruiter. 3d. ed. Den Haag: Bert Bakker-Daamen N.V., 1963.

Verzamelde Gedichten. 3 vols. Ed. Martin Hartkamp. Amsterdam-'s-Gravenhage: Athenaeum, Polak & Van Gennep, Bert Bakker, De Bezige Bij, Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 1971.

Voor en na de explosie: opstellen over poëzie. Den Haag: Bert Bakker-Daamen N.V., 1960.

Zuiverende kroniek.. Essays. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1956.

Secondary sources for this section.

Braak, Menno ter. De Duivelskunstenaar: Een studie over S. Vestdijk. Amsterdam: L.J. Veen, 1945. Braak, Menno ter. Verzameld Werk. 7vols. Amsterdam: Oorschot, 1950-51.

Cornets de Groot, R.A. De chaos en de volheid. Den Haag: Bert Bakker-Daamen N.V., 1966.

Cornets de Groot, R.A. ‘Madonna met de valken’. Vestdijk kroniek. Herfst-Winter Nummer (maart 1974), 69-84.

d'Oliveira, H.U. Jessurun. Vondsten en bevindingen: Essays over Nederlandse poëzie. Amsterdam: Polak & Van Gennep, 1967.

Gomperts, H.A. ‘An Enlightened Witch-Doctor: A note on Simon Vestdijk.’ Delta 1, no. 3 (Autumn 1958), 31-37.

Govaart, Th. Simon Vestdijk (Ontmoetingen no. 18). Desclée de Brouwer, 1960.

Guépin, J.P. In een moeilijke houding geschreven opstellen. Den Haag: Bert Bakker-Daamen N.V., 1969.

Knuvelder, Gerard. Handboek tot de Moderne Nederlandse Letterkunde. 's-Hertogenbosch: Malmberg, 1964.

Marsman, H. Verzameld Werk: Poëzie, Proza en Critisch Proza. Amsterdam: Querido, 1960.

Meijer, Reinder P. Literature of the Low Countries. A Short History of Dutch Literature in The Netherlands and Belgium. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1971.

Oversteegen, J.J. Vorm of Vent: Opvattingen over de aard van het literaire werk in de Nederlandse kritiek tussen de twee wereldoorlogen. Amsterdam: Athenaeum-Polak & Van Gennep, 1970. Over S. Vestdijk, Ed. Max Nord, Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, n.d.

Perron, Edgar du. Verzameld Werk. 7 vols. Amsterdam: Oorschot, 1954-1959.

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Vestdijk in kaart. Eds. G. Borgers, Daisy Wolthers. Den Haag: Bert Bakker-Daamen N.V., 1967.

Vries, Theun de. Hernomen konfrontatie met S. Vestdijk. Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, 1968.

Other sources consulted

Ahrendt, Hannah. ‘Reflections, Remembering Wystan H. Auden, Who Died in the Night of the Twenty-Eight of September, 1973.’ New Yorker (January 20, 1975), 39-46.

Auden, W.H. ‘The Art of Poetry XVII (An Interview).’ The Paris Review, 14, no.57 (Spring 1974), 32-69.

Auden, W.H. The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays. New York: Random House, 1962.

Auden, W.H. The Poetry of W.H. Auden. New York: Random House, 1945.

Beekman, E.M. ‘Octopus or Angel: Gottfried Benn (1886-1956),’ in Modern Occasions 2. Ed. Philip Rahv. Port Washington, N.Y: *Kennikat Press, 1974.

Chomsky, Noam. Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1966.

Dickenson, Emily. The Complete Poems. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Boston: Little, Brown, 1960.

Dodds, E.R. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966.

Emily Dickenson. Ed. Richard B. Sewall. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Gespräche mit Goethe. Ed. Johann Peter Eckermann. Wiesbaden: Insel-Verlag, 1955.

Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths. New York: George Braziller, 1959.

Greene, Graham. Lord Rochester's Monkey. Being the Life of John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester. London: Bodley Head, 1974.

Hitchman, Janet. Such a Strange Lady. An Introduction to Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957). London: New English Library, 1975.

Jakobson, Roman. ‘Verbal Communication’. Scientific American, 227, no. 3 (september 1972), 72-80.

Jung, C.G. Symbols of Transformarion. 2 vols. 1952; rpt. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962.

Kerényi, Carl. The Gods of the Greeks. 1951; rpt. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1958.

Larkin, Philip. The Less Deceived. Poems. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1960.

Pound, Ezra. Personae. The Collected Shorter Poems. New York: New Directions, 1926.

Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays 1966; rpt. New York: Dell, 1969.

Steiner, George; After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. London: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems. New York: Knopf, 1965.

Thomas, Lewis. The Lives of a Cell. Notes of a Biology Watcher. New York: Viking Press, 1974.

Tillyard, E.M.W. Poetry Direct and Oblique. London: Chatto & Windus, 1959.

Wimsatt, W.K. The Verbal Icon. Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967.