The poetry of Hans Lodeizen
Growing up, Lodeizen was a frail, introverted child whose asthma often kept him home, where he spent much of his time in the garden studying ants. In high school he came out of his shell more, captivating his classmates by reading their palms and predicting all sorts of future fortune and doom. But like many teenagers coming of age during the Second World War, he felt trapped. And he’d realized he was gay at a time when homosexuality was still widely pathologized. He dreamed of a different world where he could truly be himself.
Growing up, he was a frail, introverted child whose asthma often kept him home, where he spent much of his time in the garden studying ants. In high school he came out of his shell more, captivating his classmates by reading their palms and predicting all sorts of future fortune and doom. But like many teenagers coming of age during the Second World War, he felt trapped. And he’d realized he was gay at a time when homosexuality was still widely pathologized. He dreamed of a different world where he could truly be himself.
He found that world in the America of the late ’40s. Travel was not easy, but he managed to escape, first to London, then to the US, where he studied Biology at Amherst College and befriended James Merrill. Instantly smitten, Merrill described him as ‘clever, goodnatured, solitary, blond / all to a disquieting degree.’
During semester breaks he visited New York, Los Angeles and New Orleans and had his first sexual experiences with men. Embracing his gay identity seemed to be the breakthrough that allowed him to find his voice. Like e.e. cummings and Frank O’Hara, Lodeizen started breaking poetry down into something simpler and more immediate—one of the first poets to do so in Dutch.
“His poetry is characterized by the prescient melancholy that is also found in the work of Keats, who similarly died young… His work is of a rare poetic power. Not grand and sweeping, but honest, pure, noble… Lodeizen was a remarkable poet — not just an inspiration to those who came after him, but virtually the only one of his kind.”
His poems are intimate snapshots of his inner life in free verse, a fresh, engaging combination of everyday language and a dreamscape of associative metaphors. They are filled with steamboats, the Hudson, handsome sailors, as well as dandyesque references to cocktail parties and palaces, gloves and gondolas. We see a young person caught between yearning, indignant melancholy and an eagerness for life: ‘I will take the wind into my arms,’ ‘I will never do a lot of work.’ But there’s also a bold, joyous exploration of love between men. There is pride here, twenty years before the push for gay liberation became part of the mainstream. ‘Who cares if I am good or evil,’ he writes defiantly, ‘I am in love / Without blushing.’
Academic failure forced him to return home. Soon after he was diagnosed with leukemia and died at just twenty-six, months after the publication of his first collection, Het innerlijk behang (The Inner Wallpaper). In two and a half short years he left behind an impressive body of work. Without being a part of the Dutch literary establishment, Lodeizen left an indelible mark and has remained popular with generations of readers.
