Editorial note: here’s a giant shout out to the Youtube channel Metrisch for the obvious love poured into these videos!

“Karel van de Woestijne (België, 1878 - 1929) is perhaps the most important post-symbolist poet to have written in the Dutch language. While he was profoundly influenced by the French symbolism of the latter quarter of the nineteenth century, he also formed part of the international reaction against symbolism. His early poetry has much in common with the inclination to the everyday and to nature inspired by André Gide and Francis Jammes. Later, after World War One, his work connects with the late, modernist lyricism of Yeats and Rilke. He remained one of the most influential poets in Flanders and the Netherlands until shortly after the Second World War.

Van de Woestijne was a precocious artist, who was capable of rapidly absorbing influences of every kind, from the French Parnassians to Paul Verlaine and Emile Verhaeren. His debut collection Het vader-huis (My Father’s House) is often characterised as sentimental or atmospheric lyricism. Like the early poems of Rilke, the main concern is with musicality and atmosphere. Around 1900, he was strongly influenced by poets such as Francis Jammes, Henri de Régnier, Paul Fort and Albert Samain. It was only during a later period in his writing that his poems were to shift in the direction of the work of Baudelaire, the nineteenth-century poet with whom Van de Woestijne is most compared. 

The first signs of Van de Woestijne’s mystical tendency are to be found in prose texts. After a collection of for the most part highly imaginative stories (Janus met het dubbele voorhoofd (Janus with the Double Forehead, 1908), he found unique material – before and during the war – in the lives of saints and in the Bible (Goddelijke verbeeldingen (Divine Imaginations) and De bestendige aanwezigheid(The Enduring Presence)). This he transmuted into a virtuoso descriptive art with a moralising or spiritual tendency. The inclination to moralise, which remained one of the author’s most distinguishing features, was given reinforced expression after the war in what was to become perhaps his most characteristic prose collection: Beginselen der Chemie (The Principles of Chemistry). 

Van de Woestijne’s virtuosity is most evident in his epic poems, which were published in three volumes (Interludiën I (Interludes I) and Interludiën II(Interludes II), Zon in den Rug (The Sun at the Back)). The poems in question rework classical mythology, replete with elaborate Homeric comparisons, a technique in which his translation of the Iliad had made him an expert.”

A translator by the name of Tanis Guest translated this verse, and according to the text under the video did so for an older (no longer active) website of Poetry International. We tried our best to get in contact with him/her/they but failed to. Since this page consists of a link to a YouTube video, we can publish it, and therefore will, but would love to get in touch to give the proper props! If you know him/her/they, please let us know so that we may? Cheers.