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Over poetica en poëzie (1985)

Over poetica en poëzie

(1985)–A.L. Sötemann–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

Poetica

‘Non-spectacular’ modernism
Martinus Nijhoff's poetry in its European context

Martinus Nijhoff (1894-1953) is generally, if not unanimously, considered to be one of the great figures in twentieth century Dutch poetry. Apart from one or two isolated voices his position has not been disputed since his first book appeared in 1916 and as yet there is no sign of a decline in the near future. Interest in his work has not diminished with his death - as is often the case with famous poets - and even young poets of later generations, fighting for recognition of their own revolutionary efforts, have very seldom chosen Nijhoff as a target or a repoussoir.

So far so good. Nearly insurmountable difficulties arise, however, as soon as one attempts to characterize the poet's work and position, even in the most general way. Dutch literary history distinguishes a generation of poets, born in the eighties and writing in the neo-classicist tradition of the later Moréas, of Henry de Régnier, Charles Guérin, Albert Samain and Charles Maurras.1. These French poets of the early twentieth century, whom Marcel Raymond treats as part of le reflux, the low tide after the real symbolist flow, wrote a type of poetry in which an elegiac sensibility had recourse to strict classical forms, in which traditional syntax and poetical language were used as an antidote against the corruption of language, the degradation of style, the breaking-up of the traditional poem by their predecessors, as Charles Maurras said.2. It is not surprising that the Dutch so-called ‘generation of 1910’ felt attracted to the ‘reactionary’ stand of their French near-contemporaries, since they were confronted with a more or less similar situation, initiated by the so-called ‘Poets of the Eighties’ in Holland and now rapidly deteriorating in the hands of their epigones. The work of reconstruction had already been begun, however, by a number of older poets, among them Albert Verwey, critic, poet and editor of the literary magazine De beweging (‘The Movement’).

The group of poets succeeding this ‘generation of 1910’ were the convinced partisans of the avant-garde who are dealt with in other sections of this volume: Herman van den Bergh, Hendrik de Vries, Hendrik Marsman and Paul van Ostaijen were their major and most spectacular representatives. These men, who were born about 1900, should be considered in the light of such movements as expressionism, futurism, cubism, and dadaism.

Now Martinus Nijhoff nicely ‘bridged the gap between [the] two generations. He may be seen as a latecomer of the generation of traditionalists [...] or as the first of the modernists’, according to R.P. Meijer.3. And this is where the real problem lies. As far as the birthdate is concerned Meijer is undoubtedly right, but it is hardly enlightening to term one and the same man both a late traditionalist and an early modernist. Nevertheless it is a fact that critics and literary historians have been at a loss as to where exactly to place Nijhoff from the time he published his first volume of poems in 1916. Albert Verwey recognized immediately the distinctive originality of De wandelaar (‘The Walker’) in a very favorable review: ‘the unmistakable expression of a strong and truly original basic experience of life’, consisting of ‘Angst and horror’.4. Hardly a year later, P.N. van Eyck, the most perceptive critic of the traditionalist generation of 1910, returned to De wandelaar in Verwey's periodical, saying that Nijhoff's distinctive personality was to be found in the fact that he voiced a feeling of agony which, until then, had not been encountered in Dutch poetry to such a degree.5.

There is no doubt that the poet's voice was immediately recognized as ‘new’, as ‘modern’ by his contemporaries, but on the other hand, his use of ‘classical’ forms (sonnets and regularly rhymed stanzas) placed him in the traditionalist line. Consequently he has been conveniently pigeonholed as a ‘transitional poet’ by nearly all literary historians, and almost invariably hung on like a taillight to the chapter on the 1910 generation.

Much greater difficulties arise when efforts are made to characterize Nijhoff's poetry, isolated from the generation problem. I do not know any other poet whose work has been identified with so many different and contradictory schools or movements. If we exclude naturalism, futurism and dadaism, it is hardly possible to think of a term of literary categorization which has not been applied to this poet. He has been called a classical artist as well as a baroque one, a romantic of course, but also a romantic realist. We find his typically parnassien character elaborated upon, but other critics consider him a specifically symbolist poet. Yet others set him down as an aesthete, a decadent, an expressionist, a realist, a cubist, a surrealist, a magic realist or a representative of the Neue Sachlichkeit (‘New Objectivity’). And this ‘mad hatter's party’ has been culled from essays and studies of responsible critics and literary historians only.6. Of one thing one may be certain: this collection of fourteen slightly or fundamentally different categories is not complete.

At first, this enumeration seems to make nonsense of literary

classification, at least if one is prepared to accept the assurance that it is not the intention to hold the critics themselves up to ridicule.

When one tries to find a solution to the problem, the starting point should be that Nijhoff's poetry is a many-splendored thing indeed, or to put it in more sober terms, an extremely complicated body of writing. Things become somewhat clearer if one realizes that the terms just mentioned were not meant - or at least not all of them - to characterize the whole of Nijhoff's poetry, which in the course of his life went through at least three distinctly different stages. Then too, there is in fact something to be said about the elements which the many ‘-isms’ that originated during the last century have in common, even though they were often locked in an internecine struggle. Some scholars deny the possibility and the sense of using generic terms. Lovejoy objected to the concept of romanticism as proposed by René Wellek.7. And a fortiori one can point to A.G. Lehmann, who is of the opinion that ‘the terms “literary symbol” and “symbolist” are terms which, introduced and fortified by a series of mischances, should never have been allowed to remain in usage. [...] We may end by seeing no more than a mass of opinion out of which the less responsible critic may produce very much what he chooses for a new fancy theory of art and “impressionistic” histories of literature’.8.

On the other hand, there are authors such as Wellek, who defines his ‘concept of symbolism’ as ‘a regulative idea [struggling] with preceding and following ideals of art’, namely realism and naturalism at one end (‘the difference from romanticism may be less certainly implied’), and ‘the new avant-garde movements after 1914: futurism, cubism, surrealism, expressionism, and so on’,9. which constitute a clear break, on the other side. Anna Balakian considers this ‘postromantic era’ (with manifest roots in romanticism) to have reached ‘its apogee around 1920’.10. Yet she perceives clear links between symbolism and the surrealist, dadaist and expressionist movements as well, while considering symbolism itself as ‘another facet of naturalism, rather than its opposite’.11.

Just one step further and we reach Edmund Wilson, Hugo Friedrich and Renato Poggioli, who, with different accents, are in favor of viewing the whole development of European literature - and poetry in particular - since Baudelaire as fundamentally coherent, however widely different and even apparently mutually exclusive its manifestations during the last hundred years may look.12.

To try and unravel this immensely complicated problem is well

beyond the scope of my topic. The prominent factor is obviously the relative weight one assigns to the discrepancies which can easily be pointed out, even between two very congenial authors, on the one hand, and the interconnections with undoubtedly exist, on the other. The hallmark of an important poet or novelist is that he has a personal ‘voice’, which is immediately recognizable as such. However, no man is an island, and even the most ‘experimental’ or avant-garde writer leans heavily on the system of the literary, social and ethical conventions that exist at the time of his emergence as a literary personality. Absolute originality would imply absolute incomprehensibility, as surely as absolute adherence to an already existing set of literary conventions and traditions could not possibly result in an important work of art, at least in modern times.

One of the important lowest common denominators of ‘modern’ literature is the cult of the new. It is an age-old adage of art that ‘our’ time is (and often wants to be) different from the past, as Hans Robert Jauss has amply demonstrated,13. and despite Baudelaire's apologies for his use of the word modernité,14. its Latin equivalent modernitas dates back to the sixth century. Ernst Robert Curtius even considers this word to be one of the last legacies of the late-Latin language to the new world.15. Before Baudelaire newness was not elevated to the status of a myth, however, as is the case at the close of Les fleurs du mal, where the poet even italicized the word ‘nouveau’:

 
Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu'importe?
 
Au fond de l'Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!16.
 
 
 
(To drown in the abyss - heaven or hell,
 
who cares? Through the unknown, we'll find the new.)17.

The crucial document testifying to this mythical urge to explore the unknown is Rimbaud's famous ‘lettre du voyant’.18. In it the voluntaristic element is predominant: ‘one must make oneself a seer, [...] I work to make myself into a seer’.19. This evidently implies a systematic factor: in order to become a Prometheus (‘a thief of fire’), to find a language adequate to express these discoveries, a ‘long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses’ is an indispensable precondition, an unavoidable consequence of this being an alienation from the spontaneous self: ‘For I is someone else [...] I am present at this birth of my thought: I watch it and listen to it’.20. As a matter of course, the resulting poetry tends to be highly idiosyncratic and obscure.

The underlying psychological condition is in all probability the inability to accept the traditional transcendental solutions of human existence, as well as the rationalistic optimism ridiculed by Voltaire with his ironical: ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’.21. The resulting disorientation transforms the search for the word that could blind eternity or at least reconcile man to his existence, into a matter of life and death. Writing poetry is now going to function as a secular mysticism, a conception to which many modern poets have attested. At that moment the writing of poetry ‘ceases to be a game’ indeed.22. When the poetic process becomes a central issue to such a degree, reflection on its power and its limitations is bound to bloom: poetry is apt to turn inward, it is becoming its own subject. When the attempt to create the work to end all works, to finally solve the ultimate problem of existence, fails again and again, the resulting moods can be desolation, loneliness, irony, scepticism or aggressive nihilism. All of these are found in the poetry written since Baudelaire, and many in Les fleurs du mal itself. If my sketch is not wide of the mark - and nearly all its constituents are pointed out by other critics as relevant aspects of ‘modernism’ - it is in fact possible to consider the plethora of ‘-isms’ since Baudelaire as complexes of literary reactions to one fundamental situation of existential crisis in which different patterns of elements dominate at different moments, even within the work of one and the same author. One could hardly expect a simple, straightforward set of reactions in poeticis throughout the life of a single poet, let alone of a number of individuals whose works derive their particular value from their distinctive character, their degree of originality.

Hugo Friedrich characterizes Les fleurs du mal as ‘architecturally the “strictest” book of European lyrical poetry’.23. As far as content goes, it offers agony, paralysis, hectic heightening into irreality, death wish and a morbid play of excitation. But this negative content is brought together in a carefully thought-out composition. Due to the number of disparate elements it is not surprising that Anna Balakian considers as Baudelaire's ‘most salient characteristic [...] his diversity, his very lack of a salient trait, his virtual reversibility and multiplicity of character’.24. Nevertheless it would not be exceedingly difficult to consider this diversity, together with a number of other characteristic traits to be found in his poetry, as a complex of reactions to the one fundamental situation I have just sketched. Baudelaire was not a singleminded man, as was Mallarmé in later life, and it is this circumstance which accounts for the fact that so many apparently different or contradictory modern movements have claimed him

as their ancestor. Two poets whom Anna Balakian does not manage to unite under one heading, Mallarmé and Rimbaud, who is largely excluded from the symbolist tradition, both appeal to the author of Les fleurs du mal.25.

Nijhoff - to return to our main topic - considered it a definite sign of Baudelaire's greatness that Les fleurs du mal could be seen as seminal by later generations who recognized their own objectives in his poems and felt them to be helpful in making themselves aware of the direction they should take. ‘Baudelaire has been, in the course of seventy-five years, alternately a parnassien, a symbolist, a fantaisiste, and a religious poet. [...] Is a poet wronged [...] by such a chameleonesque after-life? I don't think so’, Nijhoff said in 1925, ‘one cannot honor a poet more highly than by appreciating him as a contemporary, a member of one's own generation’.26.

There is not a shadow of a doubt that this is exactly how the young poet Nijhoff felt about Baudelaire some ten or fifteen years earlier, when he started writing serious poetry. He could not find a starting point for the poetry he wanted to write in the withered glory of the Eighties' cult of Beauty, nor in the highly artificial platonist poetry of P.C. Boutens, ‘who had to take recourse to an all too subtle stanza structure, with certain studiedness’,27. although he recognized him as a master of poetry. The ‘nearly abstract and impersonal’ spinozistic poetry of Verwey could not serve him as a model either.28. And the fact that Nijhoff came of age at the outbreak of the First World War makes it a reasonable assumption that he had no use for the traditionalist elegiac nostalgia of his slightly older colleagues of the generation of 1910 with their ‘adorned melancholia’.

His sense of crisis, his awareness of standing naked in a chaotic world, with neither a transcendental roof over his head nor a vestigial trust in the power of reason, drove young Nijhoff to Baudelaire in the same way as it did T.S. Eliot. ‘In his essay “Donne in our time”, Eliot develops the thesis that a poet in the early part of his career should find a particular poet or a particular school of poetry for whom or for which he feels a close sympathy, and because of whom he can train his talent. To a large degree Baudelaire was this poet for Eliot’,29. wrote Wallace Fowlie in a perceptive essay ‘Baudelaire and Eliot: Interpreters of their Age’. Fowlie enumerates a number of French authors Eliot read during his stay in Paris in 1910, and concludes with the words: ‘Of all these French writers, Baudelaire had the deepest influence on Eliot’.30.

Exactly the same thing can be said of Martinus Nijhoff. Con-

sequently, it is not surprising that a Dutch essayist, Dirk W. Dijkhuis, was able to point out a number of remarkable parallels between the two poets whose first books were published at about the same time,31. even if it is reasonably certain that Nijhoff came to know Eliot's work rather late in his career.32. What Dijkhuis failed to do, was to look for their common origins, or decisive influences, among which the author of Les fleurs du mal takes pride of place, and Jules Laforgue should not be forgotten either.

Another symptom of the age is that a poet of an earlier generation, W.B. Yeats, decided at that moment to let the fools take his coat, ‘covered with embroideries / out of old mythologies / from heel to throat’, because ‘there's more enterprise in walking naked’,33. and there is little doubt that Nijhoff knew and admired Yeats' poetry at the time.34.

Although retrospective statements of poets should in general be treated with reserve, and particularly those of Nijhoff, who delighted in playing the elusive Pimpernel, there is little reason to doubt the truth of what he said about the impression Paul van Ostaijen's poems made on him in 1916. In an article entitled ‘Modern Poets’, published in 1929, he stated: ‘There was something in the hardness of the image, in the rapidity of the rhythm of these few sober lines [...] by which I was made aware of the courage, and which made me realize that here I had met someone who was living in my own age, at last someone with whom I had to reckon’.35. Among Van Ostaijen's literary ancestors Nijhoff mentioned Jules Laforgue, whose ‘casual spleen’ is explicitly emphasized. Then Nijhoff pointed to Van Ostaijen's search for unity, which prevents him from rejecting one thing while accepting another, from calling one thing beautiful and another ugly; the poet required himself to hold the whole of creation ipso facto in view as one aesthetic whole. This last statement in particular can be compared to a similar one by T.S. Eliot: ‘The contemplation of the horrid or sordid or disgusting, by an artist, is the necessary and negative aspect of the impulse towards the pursuit of beauty’.36. Later on in his article on modern poets, Nijhoff speaks of ‘certain modern movements such as dadaism’ which influenced Van Ostaijen, but for which ‘he really was far too good and too talented’.37.

These quotations may serve to elucidate the choice Nijhoff himself made from the possibilities offered, so to say, by Baudelaire and Laforgue, when he started to write serious poetry. In certain respects they coincided with the direction Eliot decided to take at about the same moment, but there are very important differences as well. The fundamental feeling of disorientation, of

chaos, of alienation, emanating from their early poetry, is what they have in common. Both experience their age and themselves as cleft from top to bottom. ‘I have seen the Eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, / and in short, I was afraid’, Eliot wrote.38. And in the same way Nijhoff declared: ‘The objects are no more than their names / I am no more than a distraught face.’39.

More or less parallel situations are to be found in Eliot's ‘Conversation galante’40. and in Nijhoff's ‘Het strijkje’41. (‘String Orchestra’), neither of which is devoid of Laforgue-like irony. Parallels can also be drawn between Eliot's ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’42. and the Dutch poet's ‘Pierrot’43. with its first lines: ‘'k Ontmoette 's nachts een vrouw bij een lantaren, / geverfd, als heidenen hun dooden verven’ (‘That night I met a woman at a street lamp, / painted, as heathens paint their dead’). It is true that Eliot's poem ends:

 
‘The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
 
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.’
 
The last twist of the knife.

Nijhoff's Pierrot, on the other hand, after a dance on the outer fringe of the abyss of bewilderment, sees himself standing alone in the dun street and takes flight. It is also true that Nijhoff uses more traditional, more emotionalizing, less ‘dry’ attributes and images than Eliot. Nevertheless, there are manifest analogies. They are due partly to common influences, partly to a commonly experienced atmosphere.

Apart from the feeling of alienation - ‘My lonely life is walking in the streets’, says Nijhoff in the title poem of his first volume44. - apart from the basic anguish, the horror of life and the fear of death, the two poets share an instinct for the meaning of tradition, although in this respect too there is a marked difference between them. Nijhoff refuses to overstrain the traditional forms of poetry. De wandelaar consists mainly of well-constructed sonnets. At a later period, in 1935, Nijhoff accuses Eliot, together with Cocteau, of holding his métier too cheap. In his view they had ‘smashed the shape of their poems like windows’.45. Nijhoff was an admirer of Baudelaire's highly praised form, whereas Eliot probably thought it ‘shabby’, all too ‘literary’, as Rimbaud had put it as early as 1871.46. Moreover, Nijhoff's images in De wandelaar do not have the predominant contemporaneity, derived from often sordid aspects of city life, or the crackling dryness of those of Eliot. In many of his poems the underlying consciousness (the état d'âme, as Valéry would say) is rather luridly expres-

sed, as in ‘Een groene grijns van Gods gruwlijk gezicht’47. (‘A green grin of God's gruesome face’), or in:

 
En als mijn hand je gele naaktheid streelt,
 
Wring 'k een vertrokken glimlach als een knaap
 
Die met zijn moeders doode lichaam speelt.48.
 
 
 
(And when my hand fondles your yellow nakedness,
 
I wring a distorted smile like a lad
 
who is playing with his mother's dead body.)

These lines are more Baudelairian than anything Eliot would permit himself. But it is not my purpose to make a detailed comparison of Nijhoff's and Eliot's poetry. By pointing to a few parallels and contrasts I only hoped to elucidate certain characteristics of Nijhoff's poetry.

It should be added that in Nijhoff's early poetry there are also - unconvincing - attempts at reconciliation:

 
Leven was goed al heeft het mij gebroken,
 
Leven is goed ofschoon het dooden maakt.49.
 
 
 
(Life was good though it broke me,
 
life is good though it makes men die.)

And in one case Nijhoff even writes a poem of celebration in which a - fundamentally unrealistic - image of paradisiacal life is evoked:

 
't Eenvoudig leven Gods is diep en klaar:
 
Een man in blauwen kiel en een vrouw in een
 
Geruiten rok en witten boezelaar.50.
 
 
 
(God's simple life is deep and clear:
 
a man in blue smock and a woman in a
 
checkered skirt and a white apron.)

When we reconsider Nijhoff's first volume, the ‘modern’ elements are the sentiments of alienation and of chaos, the pain and horror of life, the feelings of frustration, centered on the impossibility of transcendental belief - ‘Blind zien uw kindren opwaarts naar uw hemel’51. (‘With blind eyes your children look upward to your heaven’) - the affinity for the concept of ‘tainted beauty’, a comparative preference for the naked, non-poetical word and the use of blatant irony with serious intentions:

 
‘Lieve, wat zijn vanavond je oogen mooi
 
Ik voel dat 'k in dien zachten glans verander. -’
 
 
 
De maan gluurt door de takken. Oh la la!
 
De papegaai gilt in zijn koopren kooi
 
De melodieën van het strijkje na.52.
 
 
 
(‘My love, how beautiful your eyes are tonight -
 
I feel myself changing in this soft lustre. -’
 
 
 
The moon peers through the branches. Oh la la!
 
The parrot in its brass cage yelling
 
repeats the melodies of the string orchestra.)

All of this constitutes a clear break with the generally dignified, coherent character of Dutch poetry of the time. On the other hand, Nijhoff's adherence to traditional poetic forms, his abhorrence of syntactic deformations, his rejection of hermeticism, and his precocious technical mastery contributed to the sense of continuity in his early work.

From a European modernist point of view, Nijhoff's early poetry cannot be considered very ‘advanced’. The elements of unmistakable newness in a Dutch context form part of a French tradition which dates back mainly to the mid-nineteenth century and takes hardly any notice of the more extreme avant-garde aspects which this tradition acquired at a later stage in the poetry of Rimbaud and Mallarmé. Its local importance may well be compared to that of Eliot in English literature, although Eliot was certainly more ‘modern’ than Nijhoff was.

One thing, I hope, has become clear in the course of this exposé: according to the importance one attaches to one or more particular aspects of Nijhoff's poetry, it is possible to call him either a traditionalist or even a ‘classicist’, on account of his regular form, his ‘normal’ syntax and his non-hermeticism. Or one may call him a ‘modernist’ on account of the ‘new’ aspects which constitute a break with Dutch tradition. The epithet ‘romantic’ would be acceptable owing to his overt, not to imply lurid, emotionalism. And ‘baroque’ on the basis of the tension between these contradictory aspects and the marked disharmonious character of their fusion. That Nijhoff could be termed a ‘decadent’ cannot possibly be a reason for surprise anymore: Mario Praz for one places Baudelaire ‘firmly in the middle of the century, marking the division between Romanticism and Decadence’,53. by reason of a number of qualities Nijhoff shares with

the French master. The classification as a ‘symbolist’ will cause no problem at all. Thus the complicated nature of De wandelaar alone accounts for at least six out of fourteen terms used to characterize the poet, including the most contradictory qualifications of our list.

This account of Nijhoff's early poetry can hardly justify its presentation as an example par excellence of ‘non-spectacular modernism’, because outside its local Dutch context, it proved to be neither very modern nor particularly modest in appearance. It has already been said, however, that Nijhoff's career as a poet is a remarkable one, insofar as each one of his three important later volumes represents a specific new phase in his development toward the distinguishing features I have in mind.

Nijhoff's second important volume, Vormen (‘Forms’), was published in 1924. Its title looks like the proclamation of a conversion to an art for art's sake conception of poetry. It cannot be denied that this volume shows a high degree of artificiality as well as conscious artistry. Hardly a trace is left of the inner conflict, the cleft which the poet almost deliberately displayed in De wandelaar. That is to say, it has disappeared from the individual poems: nearly every one of them is the sound and perfect representative of a particular état d'âme, perfectly couched in a regular, subtle rhythmic form. In Vormen Nijhoff shows himself to be in supreme command of an elaborate repertory of means of expression. In short, he is a ‘classicist’ aesthete, showing only faint traces of his ‘modernist’ past. If one looks more closely, however, one discovers that the oppositions and contradictions have not disappeared from the volume as a whole. They have just been banished from each poem internally. The poet's hankering for a transcendental roof over his head, as well as his longing for simplicity and purity are to be found in the group of poems entitled ‘Houtsneden’ (‘Woodcuts’), a title which significantly enough implies intentional primitivism. Another group is called ‘Steenen tegen den spiegel’ (‘Stones against the mirror’), and here we find the poems of emptiness and despair:

 
Een mensch, eenzaam, ziet zijn zwarte eenzaamheid
 
Dieper weerkaatst in de oogen van een ander.54.
 
 
 
(A man, lonely, sees his black loneliness
 
reflected more deeply in the eyes of another.)

A third section is ‘Tuinfeesten’ (‘Garden Parties’) - a title reminiscent of Verlaine's Fêtes galantes55. - in which

 
[Het] hart, ontvangend wat het hart behoeft,
 
Niet meer van pijn verbijsterd, niet meer ziek,
 
Vergeet - een glimlach lang - wat het bedroeft.56.
 
 
 
(The heart, receiving what the heart needs,
 
no longer dazed by pain, no longer sick,
 
forgets - for the time of a smile - what saddens it.)

The shrill emotionalism has gone from the poems. The fundamental problem has been transferred to the ground plan, to the architecture of the book.57. In this respect Vormen can very well be compared to Les fleurs du mal, about which Eliot said: ‘[Baudelaire's poems] seem to me to have the external but not the internal form of classic art. One might even hazard the conjecture that the care for perfection of form, among some of the romantic poets of the nineteenth century, was an effort to support, or to conceal from view, an inner disorder’, adding later on that Baudelaire was ‘by his nature the first counter-romantic in poetry’.58.

It may be said that in the period between De wandelaar and Vormen, Nijhoff's poetry turned inward to the less obvious and certainly more essential aspects of the modernist tradition. Writing poetry, in his conception, is no longer Wordsworth's ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’, no effusion of the heart. The poet no longer weeps, on the contrary, he is aware of being aware. He feels himself to be an actor playing a part in his own life. He moves away from himself, he transposes feeling to form, he objectifies. The poet is a sensitive and subtle constructor, who makes an object, a cooled-down ‘thing’ consisting of words, not of ideas. Words are a specific kind of material with which it is possible to objectify mental states by obeying the laws inherent in the material. At a certain moment words, linguistic and prosodic forms, take the initiative, assume a creative power emanating from themselves. The poet disappears from his poem and the resulting object may transcend the limits and the human limitations of the person who wrote it. Ever since the disappearance of the great philosophies and the great religions, there has been only art to show us a reality above this world and its mundane nature. Consequently, writing becomes a form of positive mysticism. The word of the poet conceals a final form of ‘re-ligion’ in the etymological sense of the word, a religion of reality, a sensory incarnation of what has been Seen.59.

I suppose no one will have any difficulty recognizing in Nijhoff's statements the basic philosophy of modernist art from Baudelaire, via Rimbaud, Mallarmé and Valéry to Eliot, Wallace

Stevens and W.H. Auden. The specific interrelations do not have to be pointed out one by one.

The remarkable thing about Vormen is that the underlying modernist conception - elements of which are, either directly or indirectly, the subject of several individual poems as well - results in a poetry which to all outward appearances has very few, if any, modernistic characteristics. There are two reasons for this paradox. In the first place, Nijhoff saw as the core of modernism not the external aspects: ‘[The “esprit moderne”] does not consist in the nature of the schools, not in their rapid, restless change, not in the different tendencies, not in a shadowy greatest common divisor of all these multiples. It consists in the need for a program itself’.60. And a program is to be found at the base of Nijhoff's work, although he never troubled to formulate it expressly in a coherent form. In the second place - and here we are confronted with the special character of Nijhoff's particular brand of modernity - he abhorred every kind of ostentatious display. Repeatedly he rejected the spectacular aspects of modernism. It was his firm belief that sincerity could be recognized in the poet's reticence rather than in his excessiveness.61. He advocated a new sensibility, to be expressed by restraint. Straining or violating language was contrary to his nature. Nijhoff incriminated the expressionists: ‘Like bats they were hanging from the German gutters, shouting through loudspeakers that they were fallen angels’,62. and he deplored Van Ostaijen's temporary allegiance to dadaism.

‘One is surprised’, Nijhoff records, ‘every time one rereads the work of great innovators as widely divergent as Keats or Baudelaire, how new and opinionated their way of feeling is for us, still, again and again - and how restrained, in spite of their separateness, how chaste are the means which they put to work. The real innovators of poetic form have contented themselves in their youth with pouring new wine into old bottles, and not until they had attained a riper age did they proceed, from a consolidated inner nature, to the application of new forms which struck them as necessary rather than as far-fetched, as self-evident rather than new’.63.

This quotation from Nijhoff forms a striking parallel with Baudelaire's remarks: ‘And systems of prosody and rhetoric have never yet prevented originality from clearly emerging. The contrary - namely that they have assisted the birth of originality - would be infinitely more true’.64. Nijhoff would have subscribed wholeheartedly to the French poet's statement: ‘But a great painter is perforce a good painter, because a universal imagination embraces the understanding of all means of expression and the

desire to acquire them’.65. Nijhoff's principal objection to ‘glaring modernisms’ and ‘offensive straining’ was that they all too often betray an inadequate command of technique. It was only surpassed by his basic aversion to abstractions in poetry.66.

It might be concluded that Nijhoff's poetry in Vormen was fundamentally modern, though not in the least modernistic. From a formal point of view the poems could be termed classicistic, or - owing to their ‘coolness’ and their remarkable plastic qualities - even parnassien.

Shortly after he had published Vormen, Nijhoff decided definitely to give up all attempts at transcendental experience and mysticism in a religious sense, and to choose the other extreme: ‘to keep [my soul] down with me in the body’.67. One of his most brilliant poems, ‘Het lied der dwaze bijen’, (‘The Song of the Foolish Bees’), expresses the unavoidable ultimate defeat of all attempts to reach the ‘higher honey’ during life:

 
Niemand kan van nature
 
In lijve de dood verduren.68.
 
 
 
(Nobody can by nature
 
endure death in life.)

As so often is the case with Nijhoff's poetry, double meanings abound in these two lines: ‘van nature’ means ‘in accordance with the laws of nature’ as well as ‘in view of human nature and its limitations’, ‘in lijve’ means ‘in the body’ as well as ‘still alive’.

‘The Song of the Foolish Bees’ is written in terza rima stanzas of iambic trimeter with an inserted repetition of the first line between the second and the third. The stanzas thus consist of four lines. Owing to the changes in their syntactic relations to lines two and four, the identical first and third lines show subtle differences in meaning. This method makes clear how a refined personal effect - undoubtedly modern - can be attained by the use of traditional material while respecting ‘the adamant laws of syntax.’

Nijhoff's conversion to reality confronted him with the problem ‘of working upon reality while allowing it to remain reality’,69. in order to have the sensation ‘that life suddenly assumed improbable dimensions in the reality of broad daylight’.70. For Nijhoff it could not be a matter of violating ‘the common property of language with its deep, interlaced roots, with its chaste and adamant syntax’.71. He had to try and find a personal language by developing this common property. The inevitable artificial element inherent in all art had to be fully respected, whereas no

traces of hard work should remain visible in the finished product. The tone had to be cool without being chilly, the diction bare, the final impression sober, but on no account should the poem sink into inane simplicity.72. The search for reality implied a keen sense of contemporaneity. The task looked forbidding and little help was to be expected from experiments by other poets. They had generally concentrated on cultivating one or two aspects of the modernist complex and so forced them into rarefied hothouse products. Something could be gained from the fascination the surrounding world held for young Cocteau, ‘maigre Colomb des phénomènes’.73. And of course, Nijhoff allowed, there was the way in which Eliot had made room for narration.74. But Nijhoff felt that these modernists had slighted their métier. In principle he had to conduct the search by his own light.75.

‘The Song of the Foolish Bees’ was included in Nijhoff's next volume of poetry with the significant title Nieuwe gedichten (‘New Poems’), 1934. The opening poem, a dialogue between a poet and an old tree in the backyard which now hardly yields any fruit, could be considered a program. The poet ends the dialogue by taking recourse to the traditional image of the poet as a nightingale, placed in new surroundings:

 
- Stil! Hoor! De nachtegaal hervat
 
zijn lied in 't hartje van de stad.

To this the tree replies:

 
- Men heeft er woningen gebouwd
 
van nieuwe steen en blinkend hout.76.
 
 
 
(Quiet! Listen! The nightingale resumes
 
his song in the heart of the city.
 
- They built houses there
 
of new brick and shining wood.)

It is clear that the poet finds new inspiration for his age-old craft in the contemporary city. It is a city in which man may live and feel at home.

Nijhoff's first attempt to write poetry on a large scale is partly inspired by medieval examples.77. Painters such as Breughel and Jan van Eyck placed the scriptural history of man's salvation in their own surroundings. Thus, in ‘Het veer’ (‘The Ferry’), Nijhoff placed the martyred Saint Sebastian in a very real twentieth century Dutch landscape where he becomes aware of ‘hoe dieper

't bloed is dan de hemel hoog’ (‘how much deeper is the blood than the heavens are high’),78. and now knows that he has slighted the miraculous body which inhabited him during his life on earth. It is suggested that God in His mercy gave St. Sebastian a chance to redress his mistake by letting him be reborn in the house near the ferry. Anyway, that is the story which the poet wants to believe. The evocation of the world around us is singularly tangible and convincing. The nouns - ‘our sole wealth of language consists of nouns, the direct naming of objects’, Nijhoff says79. - could hardly be more simple and more straightforward. They refer to everyday things. Adjectives have been used rather sparingly and neither they nor the verbs have been taken from the more exalted or ‘poetical’ layers of language. The ‘story’ itself is straight and simple, although a miracle does occur. But it is an inverted miracle, since St. Sebastian is converted to earthly reality and fertility, and it is the God of reality who is supposed to intercede. The poem is written in blank verse. The sentences are extraordinarily long, up to fifteen lines. However, they are spread over the lines smoothly and effectively, producing expressive enjambments. They are perfectly grammatical, following ‘the adamant laws of syntax’, and very complicated at the same time. Besides, the subtle and unexpected combination of rather ordinary words yields remarkable effects. Nevertheless this first demonstration of Nijhoff's new, though ostensibly effortless modernism has proved to be a rather difficult poem. Several contradictory interpretations have been advanced, leading one to conclude that in ‘Het veer’ the poet has managed successfully to ‘hide his religion of reality’ under the cover of simplicity and naturalness, although it still possesses obvious tinges of artificiality in its ‘medievalistic’ staging and its complex syntax.

His second great attempt is a much longer poem, ‘Awater’,80. its title being the name of the protagonist. It is, again, written in iambic pentameter, but in the form of laisses monorimes, long assonating stanzas, borrowed from the Chanson de Roland. The poet thought of his age as a transition from an age of individualism to an age of collectivism, and, according to him, in these circumstances the greatest difficulty for an author is the form of his language. Traditional form has become as treacherous as spontaneous discharge. In order to solve the dilemma he fell back on a tradition, ‘so old as to have become unconscious’.81. Of course, this is a self-delusion, but Nijhoff preferred the origin to an extreme, as he put it. And he handled it with undoubted mastery. His command was such that in one of the laisses he incorporated a perfect Italian sonnet, in which the rhymes all

assonate between themselves, as in Mallarmé's ‘Le cygne’. ‘Awater’ has much shorter sentences than ‘Het veer’. The average length is hardly two lines, and consequently the syntax is much simpler. Besides, Nijhoff admitted colloquial expressions of a kind which he would not have envisaged in the earlier poem.

The subject of ‘Awater’ is the quest for a traveling companion through the hell, the desert of the modern city,82. from which, consequently, the verbal material is taken. Nijhoff has banished all overt emotion from his poem, to a much higher degree than he had done in ‘Het veer’, referring to the method of surrealist paintings ‘with their stillness, their unemotional lucidity, their clear objects, as banal as they are mysterious’,83. and to what he considered to be their literary equivalent: ‘new objective’ prose.

The obvious danger of this process of paring is that one cuts into the quick of the poem. To prevent this the poet had recourse to three complicating elements. In the first place he worked in a number of cultural references, both scriptural and literary. When the clerk Awater leaves his office, he comes down the stairs holding on to the brass banisters and takes his walking stick from a stand. The sandstone steps, the serpents of brass, and the dry thistle (being the walking stick),84. immediately suggest the desert of the modern city, but also Moses and the children of Israel on their journey to the Promised Land. In this way fundamentally banal acts, such as having his hair cut, smoking a cigarette, or keeping accounts acquire mysterious and functional overtones. Moreover, there is a subtle interlacing of familiar expressions and complicated, refined sentence structures. Finally Nijhoff uses an artifice which has been described by J.L. Kugel as an important element of modern poetry: ‘the poet creates the strangeness by not telling everything, or, more precisely, by implying that not everything has been told’. And: ‘this kind of symbolist poem presents a wholly coherent utterance, without any [...] lexical or grammatical friction [...] But when these poems are successful, they produce [a] feeling of withheld information and incomprehension’.85. This is exactly what Nijhoff intended to do: ‘[Awater] had to remain outline, clear translucent surface’.86.

The result is a poem with a clear, translucent surface indeed, but very complex, if not nearly impenetrable below - no clear water, but hard crystal. A considerable number of contradictory interpretations bear witness to this fact.87.

In his last great poem, ‘Het uur U’ (‘Zero Hour’),88. Nijhoff continues his quest for purity and his myth of collectivism. This time he starts from present day common speech; the poem contains an asthonishing number of familiar expressions and a very

high percentage of simple monosyllabic words. But he tried to intensify and to purify ‘the words of the tribe’89. by heightening their expressiveness, by making them ‘telling and vibrant’.90. The rhyme scheme is about the simplest one possible: aabbcc... etc., and all rhymes are masculine. But there is not a trace of monotony, as the rhyming words are hardly ever stressed in the sentence. In many cases, they are conjunctions, prepositions or adverbs. Besides, there are few full stops at the end of the lines. Another threat of monotony was averted by Nijhoff's choice of a nonmetrical rhythmic pattern. The short lines consist of five to nine syllables, of which generally three are stressed. This accounts for a remarkable variety. And once again one has to admire Nijhoff's wonderfully lithe syntax, which even allows him to tell his ‘story’ in what one might term a child-like way, putting questions to the reader: ‘In welk land kwam hij aan? / Op aarde. - In eigen land. -’ (‘And to what country did he come? / To earth, to his own country’), or claiming his attention by such expressions as ‘let wel’ (‘mark my words’). And miraculously, there are only one or two places in 476 lines where the poem falls flat.

The narration is simple: a man, who does not wear anything that might distinguish him from another man, passes through a self-satisfied well-to-do suburban street on a hot summer afternoon. The surprising effect of this passing is that the adults who live there are confronted with their human deficiency. Yet, the children in the street are not affected and normal life resumes its course after the man has disappeared.

The man himself cannot be identified. He has some Christ-like aspects, but also some aspects of Death. He remains enigmatic to an even higer degree than Awater. Nevertheless, ‘Zero Hour’ as a whole is much less impenetrable than ‘Awater’. It constitutes an ultimate, precarious but successful result of Nijhoff's individual solution to the problem of modernism.91.

There is one more thing I should like to point out. ‘Zero Hour’ ends with a short lyrical reflection:

 
Hoe mooi anders, ach hoe mooi
 
zijn bloesems en bladertooi. -
 
Hoe mooi? De hemel weet hoe.
 
Maar dat is tot daaraantoe.
 
 
 
(How beautiful, though, oh, how beautiful
 
are blossoms, and leaves' splendor.
 
How beautiful? Heaven knows how.
 
But that is irrelevant.)

As a reaction to the ‘dead life’ of the townspeople he has described, the poet sceptically compares it to the beauty of blossoms and the rich foliage, symbols of natural, ‘living’ life. Then he suddenly turns it into a real question: how beautiful indeed? The answer he gives is a twofold one, and it is typical of Nijhoff in later life. At first sight the last lines have even stronger overtones of scepticism. Nijhoff uses two familiar expressions, both of them implying ‘let's leave it alone’, ‘why bother’, ‘things are as they are, and that is that’. But on closer inspection it is also possible to read the lines literally: ‘How beautiful indeed? Heaven does know how beautiful they are. But we won't know until we die. It is a long way to Heaven.’ It is not exactly a profession of belief, but at the same time it is the opposite of weary scepticism.

The creation of double meaning became more frequent as Nijhoff grew older and refused to be pinned down to an unambiguous standpoint in metaphysical and transcendental matters. He was neither a sceptical agnostic nor a believer, or perhaps both. The lines are typical of Nijhoff's technical mastery. If he wanted to, he could say two things at a time. And more than once he did.

I hope to have shown that all of the fourteen labels - with the exception of ‘expressionist’ - have been applied to Nijhoff's poetry with a certain measure of justification. In addition to the ones summarized before, we have now encountered realism, surrealism, magic realism and new objectivity. On the other hand, there seems to be hardly any doubt that Nijhoff started from a complex of presuppositions and assumptions that should be termed typically modern, and that he consistently worked out his individual solution to the resulting problems. In the process he obviously concentrated increasingly on the essential principles of modernism, while rejecting a number of facile, strained extremist developments of isolated aspects that had resulted in a number of ostensibly separate movements. Nijhoff's solution is to a large extent unique in a European context. The fact itself that his coherent development shows occasional affinities with so many different modernist movements constitutes a plea for the fundamental underlying unity of this multiplicity of schools.


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