Naar een heilige schoonheid van de vorm: Willem Kloos' poëzieleer en de praktijk

Abstract

In his external poetics up to 1895 Willem Kloos assumes that ‘form and content in poetry are one’. With this axiom Kloos suggests that true art only comes into being when the poet expresses his ideas, intentions and emotions by means of a unique form. However, this is not the only requirement a true artist has to comply with. With regard to the writing process Kloos points out that genuine poetry is born in the mind of the poet. The whole verse, in the right form, is located there and the poet has to write down the lines. On the basis of the study of the genesis of the long, epical fragment Okeanos these considerations about the writing process are first of all compared with Kloos’s actual practice. This comparison shows that Kloos’s practice is a bit more complicated; even he had to fiddle with his verses before he got them published. Furthermore Kloos’s external poetics, with the emphasis on the form, are reviewed in the light of his implied, internal poetics that can be deduced from the genesis of Okeanos. Also internally, the essential words prove to be form and content. However, this is less so in early versions of Okeanos than in later ones, since many of the alterations Kloos made are formal by nature.