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Classic poetry

Classic poetry is a container term for very different kinds of poetry. Poetry of the Middle Ages becomes classic by surviving time, experimental, traditional or modern poetry can become classic by a canonization process. Here you can find examples of these diverse ‘classical’ poets.


  • Cover Songs
    Cover Songs
    Songs
    Inspired poems that stand the ravages of time
    De Standaard

    Hadewijch's Songs are the beating heart of Dutch-language  literature. This mystic was the first woman in Europe to have dared to sing of mystical love in pure love poetry. Hadewijch created with astounding mastery and linguistic skill a mysticism of desire.

  • Cover Complete Poems
    Cover Complete Poems
    Complete Poems
    Precocious and languorous poems

    Karel van de Woestijne is perhaps the most important post-symbolist poet to have written in the Dutch language. Van de Woestijne’s collected work consists of almost one thousand pages of poetry and an equal amount of prose, a significant portion being dedicated to epic poetry and essays on the visual arts and literature.

  • Cover Grotesques
    Cover Grotesques
    Grotesques
    Very well worth discovering
    Staalkaart

    ‘Novellas that attempt to make a fool of people,’ is how Paul van Ostaijen once described his grotesques. In these astonishing texts full of absurd blow-ups, he lashed out against the wrongs of his time, mercilessly unsettling all logic.

  • Cover The Poems
    Cover The Poems
    The poems
    His poems seem so easy and so obvious, but their core is the sense of being alone in a silent world
    Hugo Brems

    A constant in Herman de Coninck's poems is the urge to bring poetry closer to everyday reality without adopting the pose of a distant observer. In his poems, he often takes a familiar situation as the point of departure, things like an autumn walk or a birthday party. He is a poet of understatement, who counters sentimentality with ironic humour.