be demonstrated by ‘Verwandlung’ as with Rilke. In poetry Vestdijk stands for concretizing abstract principles.
There is a difference between ‘musical’ and ‘significative’ poetry, the latter being an intelligent and meaningfull peotry. To write poetry is more than giving wind to sounds or mumbling syllables, it is a way of understanding central issues of life. It gives expression to an idea. But poetry is ambiguous, a poem gives birth to precise direction but within a context of imprecision. Vestdijk is characterized by his ‘indirect optics’, an indirect way of looking at reality.
The image of what a poem should be is given as a Shining Germ Cell. Such a cell is suggestive of a microscopical universe of a monade. Vestdijk is not in favor of a poem that is bursting with sounds nor stuffed with zigzagging ideas. A poem should keep a well-ordered balance between opposites, especially the concrete and the abstract. Poetry is a way-of-knowing differing from philosophy. The most significant form for significative poetry is the sonnet.
In a poem we acknowledge Verwandlung, a development, a proces and al this means dynamism. In a poem about love, the poet is moved by a dynamism of recalling, a return from the past of a loved-one. Poetry recalls, it is moved by loss.
Like Wittgenstein Vestdijk was well aware of the treachery of language. Enforced regression, as it often appears in a poem, is an act of despair, an armed admission never victorious. When we express ideals - ‘Oppressing Ideals’ - these ideals ask too much of us by simple grammatical agreement. Vestdijk often speaks in aphorisms: ‘The road to hell is not paved with good intentions but with grammatically ordered nonsense’.
In ‘The essence of Paradox’ Vestdijk refuses to allow the ideal the upper hand. So the absolute is a fiction and the relative is reality. Vestdijk - in reminiscense of Martin Buber's theory - sees the I and the Other as a fundamental human paradox. This is so much so that this essential paradox shaped the frustrations of his novels in a more psychological manner.
Vestdijk's thinking and poetry are concerned with dynamic polarities, restlesness and vitality and are therefore full of life. The comparison of a poem with a germ-cell holds that the poem stands for the possibility of all forms. Specialization would imprison it. The Ur-cell is the place of Verwandlung, metamorphosis. But this means that Vestdijk never solves a riddle. Life is mysterious, a poem vibrates for ever with formless life and there is no end to bafflement and pain. In assuming solutions there is innocence or stupidity.
In Part Two of his essay Dr. Beekman shows how Vestdijk mastered practical problems in his own poems. He writes about his use of ‘blurring rhyme’ and his way of handling images. In a comparison between Wallace Stevens’ ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Heaven’ and Vestdijk's description of Amsterdam, he shows how the addition of detail does not necessarily equal precision. In Vestdijk's case the poem does not become static, the picture is vibrant in a hushed tone. Amsterdam is pictured as dynamic, a ghosttown of activity, in a vibrating and mysterious atmosphere.
Vestdijk was imprisoned by the Germans during their occupation of his country. His poems became more contemplative, without losing their plasticity
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