This article deals by owning a forms of literature written in the Dutch language. Even as English literature is not restricted to England alone, Dutch-language authors do not necessarily own to exist as from either a Netherlands, as Dutch literature is or even was too produced within more (erstwhile) Dutch-speaking regions: Belgium, Surinam, the Netherlands Antilles, Aruba, the previous Dutch East Indies (as of 1949 the republic of Indonesia).

Around its earliest stages, Dutch literature is defined when people pieces of literary merit written within one of a Dutch accent. Prior to a seventeenth century, there wwhen no unified standard language; a idiom that come considered Dutch (as opposed to Low German) are thought to keep around diverged from either Low Franconian around the eighth century.

Earliest stages (800–1550)
For a earliest stages of the Dutch language (so its literature), the boundaries by using what is today considered German are vague & a bit of fragments and authors come claimed for each realms. Examples include a ninth-century Wachtendonk Psalms, a West On line Franconian translation of a few of the Psalms on a threshold of what is considered Dutch, and the twelfth-century Loon poet Henric van Veldeke, an early contemporary of Walther von der Vogelweide who is claimed by both Dutch & German literature (the Germans call for him Heinrich von Veldeke).

Reproduction of the "Hebban olla vogala" fragment (click to enlarge).The earliest literature to be indisputably considered Dutch is a two-line lyric poetry fragment written down by an anonymous tenth-century West Flemish monk to try his pen:

Hebban ola vogala nestas hagunnan hinase hic
Enda thu wat unbidan you nu
100% birds develop began nests except me
& professional people — what come i waiting for?

In the Low Countries as in the rest of Europe, courtly romance and poetry were popular genres during a Middle Ages. 1 such Minnesanger was the said Van Veldeke. A chivalric epic was a popular genre too, typically featuring King Arthur or Charlemagne (Karel ende Elegast, "Charlemagne and Elegast") when protagonist.

Literary prose wwhen hardly written during this era as prose was a domain of "serious" occupations like history & theology. Drama, on a other hand, flourished two at the moo (farce) and high level. Theatre was seen per church as a means of edifying humans so mystery plays (Mariken van Nieumeghen, "Mary of Nijmegen") and morality plays (Peter van Diest's Elckerlijc, "Everyman") abounded.

a total of the living works, especially the stately romances, were copies from either or even even expansions of earliest German or French efforts, but there are examples of truly original works (like Karel ende Elegast) or Dutch-language works that formed a basis for version within more languages (Elckerlijc formed a basis for Everyman).

A languages currently called Dutch & Flemish did non lead off to require distinct shape till just about a prevent of the 11th century. from either either either two or three existent fragmentstwo conjuration from a 8th century, a version of a Psalms from the 9th century, & many chartersa supposed Old Dutch language hwhen been recognized; however Dutch literature actually commences inside the 13th century, as Middle Dutch, the creation of the number one national movement in Brabant, Flanders, Holl& and Zealand.

From either a wreck of Frankish lawlessness there is no echt folk-folk tale of Dutch antiquity use came down to america, & scarcely any echoes of German myth. But then, a sagas of Charlemagne & Arthur pop up immediately within Middle Dutch forms. These were manifestly introduced Minstrel by mobile minstrels & troubadour, & translated to gratify a curiosity of the noble women. These are seldom that the title of such a translator has reached america, however you happen to underst& that the fragments you possess of the French romance of William of Orange were written inside Dutch by a certain Klaas van Haarlem, between 1191 and 1217. A Chanson diamond state Rol& was translated just about a equivalent instance, and well late Parthenopeus de Blois. A Flemish minstrel Diederic van Assenede completed his version of Floris et Blanc/jefteur astir 1250. A Arthurian legends come out to own been bring round Flanders by occasionally Flemish settler around Wales, in their go to to their mother-united states. All about 1250 a Brabantine minstrel translated Walter Maps Lancelot du lac at the command of his liege, Lodewijk van Veltbem. A Gauvain was translated by Pennihc & Vostaert prior to 1260, when a number 1 original Dutch writer, a notable Jakob van Maerlant, occupied himself astir 1260 by owning many romances treating by using Merlin & a Holy Grail. the earliest existent fragments of a heroic poem of Reynard a Dodger were written witharound Latin by Flemish priests, & astir 1250 a number 1 section of a crucial version in Dutch was mass produced by Willem the Minstrel, of whom these are unlucky that you understand those days are gone save that he was the translator of a misused romance, Madoc. Around his existent operate andy skinner follows Pierre delaware Saint-Cloud, but not slavishly; & he is the number one really admirable writer that i personally meet by owning inside Dutch literature. A 2nd section was added by an additional. These are non necessary to dwell at any length on a monkish legends & a anthem to the Virgin Mary which were extravagantly produced when you took the 13th century, & which, though destitute of a lot literary merit, were of utilise when exercises Brabant. in the infancy of the language. the 1st lyrical writer of Holland was John We, duke of Brabant, world health organization practised a minnelied successfully, however whose songs come merely known to america across a Swabian version of two or three of the babies. Inside 1544 a earliest collection of Dutch folk-songs saw a weak, & around that volume of these or even ii romances of the 14th century come preserved, of which Het Daghet in den Oosten is the better known. Most a earliest fragment of Dutch popular poetry, however of late instance, is an historical ballad describing a slaying of Count Floris V. around 1296. The super curious collection of secret mediaeval anthem by Sister Hadewych, the nun of Brabant, was foremost printed around 1875 by Heremans & Ledeganck.

Thus far, when i have seen, a Middle Dutch language experienced laid itself at a service of a genus sternotherus & order, flattering the traditions of chivalry & of religion, however scarcely locating anything to say to the bulk of the people. By owning a close of the 13th century a vary come across the face of Dutch literature. A Flemish towns began to prosper & to assert their commercial mastery on top a Northward Sea. Under such modest rulers when William II & Floris V., Dort, Amsterdam, & more cities contrived to win such privileges when amounted all but to political independence, & by owning this liberty there arose the fresh rather literary expression. A founder & author of this original Dutch literature was Jacob van Maerlant Macriant. (letter q.v.). His Naturen Bloeme, write of 1263,forms an epoch around Dutch literature; these are the collection of lesson & satiric addresses to everthing classes of society. Sustaining his Rijmbijbel (Rhyming Bible) he foreshadowed a braveness & free streaming-thought of the Reformation. It was non until 1284 that he began his masterpiece, De Spieghel Historiael (A Mirror of History), at a command of Count Floris V. Of his adherent, Boendale. a virtually all considerable around South Holland was Jan van Boendale (1280-1365), called Jan first state Klerk. He was natural around Brabant, & became clerk to the justices at Antwcrp north 1310. He was entrusted by using various crucial missions. His works come historical & moral within character. Around him a go trace of the old medieval & romanticist element has disappeared. He completed his far-famed rhyme history, a Brabanlsche Veesten, around 1350; it contains a history of Brabant down to it date, & was brought down to 1440 by an anon. down the road writer. For English readers these are disappointing that Boendales more dandy historical operate (Van den derden Edewaert, coninc van Ingelant . . ., ed. J. F. Willems, Ghent, 1840), an account of Edward III. & his expedition to Flanders witharound 1338, has survived sole in occasionally fragments. A remainder of Boendales works come didactical verse form, pursuing however farther a moral thread foremost taken higher by Maerlant, & founded in mediaeval scholastic literature. Around Ypres the school of Maerlant was represented by Jan diamond state Weert, a operating surgeon, world health organization died around 1362, & Weert. world health organization was andy skinner of ii remarkable works of moral sarcasm & exhortation, the Nieuwe Doctrinael of Spieghel 500 Sonden, & a Disputacie van Rogier prevent van Janne. In a beginning of the 13th century Gielijs van Molhem wrote the Dutch version of a share of the Miserere of the Picard poet world health organization concealed his identity under the title of the solitudinarian of Moiliens. A verse form consisted of meditations on the origin & destiny of human, & on the sins of pride, envy, etc. A translation, completed afterwards by an creator calling himself Heinrec,was critically edited (Groningen, 1893) by P. Leendertz. Inside Northward Holl& a greater talent than that of Weert or even of Boendale was exhibited Stoke, by Melis Stoke, a monk of Egmond, world health organization wrote the history of the state of Holl& to the season 1305; this function, the Rijmkronik, was printed inside 1591, & edited around 1885 for the Utrecht Historical Society; and for its exactness and microscopic detail it has proved of immeasurable service to afterwards historiographer.

Sustaining a middle of a 14th century the medieval spirit come again into fashion. The certain revival of the forms of feudalistic life mass produced its appearance under William III & his successors. Knightly romances come once again into vogue, however a newborn didactical poetry contended smartly against a domination of what was lyrical & epic. It is seen that from either the super number 1 a literary spirit inside Holl& began to assert itself within a homely and utilitarian spirit. Jan van Heelu, a Brabanter, was andy skinner of an epic poem on the battle of Woeronc (1288), dedicated to Princess Margaret of Engl&, and to him has been attributed the however ticket romance of the War of Grimbergen. However sir thomas more thoroughly blue-blooded inside feeling was Hem van Aken, the priest of Louvain, world health organization Aken. lived astir 1255-1330, & world health organization combined to a super curious extent the romantic & didactical elements. When early when 1280 he experienced completed his translation of the Roman de la rose, -which he must develop commenced in the lifespan of Jean de Meung. Sir thomas more remarkable than any of his translated works, yet, is his original romance, completed inside 1318, Heinric nut Margriele van Limborch, upon which he was at function for twenty-27 years. around a cycle of the Bavarian period (1349-1433) super little original writing of great deal value was produced in Holland. Buodewijn van 500 Loren wrote of these fantabulous piece on the Maid of Ghent, inside 1389. Augustijnken van Dordt was the wayfaring minstrel of N Holl&, world health organization composed for the sheriff Aelbrecht and for the count of Blois from either 1350 to 1370. Such of his verses equally keep around been handed down to u.s.a. come allegoric & moral. Willem van Hildegaersberch (1350-1408) was an additional northern poet, of the extra strictly political cast. Numbers of of his writings survive however unpublished, & may be rough out style & wanting around form. Towards a prevent of the 14th century an titillating poet of considerable power arose in the human of the lord of Waddinxsveen & Flubrechtsambacht, Dirk Potter van five hundred Closet (c. 1365-1428), world health organization was secretary at a court of the numbers of Holland. When you took an embassy around Rome (1411-1412) this eminent diplomat manufactured himself acquainted the writings of Boccaccio, & commenced the huge verse form on the course of love, Der Minnen Loep which occurs as tremendous mixture of definitive & Biblical cases of amorous dangerous undertaking placed around a framework of didactical philosophy. Inside Dirk Potter a endure traces of the knightly element died away from Dutch literature, & left poetry totally in the paws of the school of Maerlant. Numerous early songs, sustaining the bit of of late date, come preserved within a Liedekens-Boeck printed by Jan Roulans (Antwerp, 1544). A unique copy inside the Wolfenbtittel library was edited by Hoffmann von Fallersleben in Horae Belgicae (vol. xi., 1855).

These are today period to assume a incubation of prose literature in the On line Countries. A oldest pieces of Dutch prose okay, inside being come charters of the towns of Flanders & Zeal&, dated 1249, 1251 and 1254. a prose translation of the Old Testament was processed astir 1300, & there is the Life of Jesus all about the equivalent date. Of a mysterioamerica sermoniser whose religious writings use at times reached us, the Brussels mendicant, Jan van Ruysbroec (1294 1381), is the first. However a virtually all interesting relics of mediaeval Dutch prose, when far when a formation of a language is caring, come a popular romances where the romanticist stories of the trouvres & minstrels were translated for the gain of the unlettered public into elementary language. When around virtually all European nations, the religious drama will require a large place inside each survey of mediaeval literature inside Holland. Alas a text of all a earliest mysteries, the language of which would own an extraordinary interest for america, has been misplaced. You possess records of dramas with been played at various wharehouses My Lords Resurrection, at a Hague, around 1400; My Lady blessed virgaround, at Arnheim, within 1452; & A 3 Kings, at Delft, in 1498. the earliest existent fragment, nevertheless, is a share of a Limburg-Maastricht Passover Play of astir 1360. Holy Sacrament, composed by the certain Smeken, at Breda, & performed in St Johns day, 1500. Sustaining these strictly theological dramas there were acted mundane farces, performed outside a churches by semi-religious corporations; these curious moralities were referred to as Abelespelen & Sotternieen. Within these pieces you discover a foremost traces of that genius for sale comedy which was later to choose hone form in a dramas of Bredero & the paintings of Teniers.

A theatrical corporations good alluded to, Gesellen van den Spele, formed a germ away from which developed a illustrious Chambers of Rhetoric which united inside cpambers themselves all a literary movements that occupied the Rhetozic. Sale Countries in a period of the Fifteenth & Sixteenth centuries.

A poets of Holl& experienced already found withinside late mediaeval days a value of lodge in promoting a arts and industrial handicrafts. A term colleges first state rhtoriqueis supposed to use at times been introduced astir 1440 to a courtiers of the Burgundian dynasty, however the institutions themselves existed yearn prior to. These literary club lasted till a prevent of a 16th century, & inside a period of the greater section of that instance preserved a entirely mediaeval character, potentially whenever the influences of the Renaissance & the Reformation obliged the children to modify in a few degree their outbound forms. It were witharound a lot but all shells absolutely middle-class within tone, & opposing to patrician ideas & tendencies in thought. One remarkable bodies a earliest were most completely engaged inside preparing mysteries & miracle-plays for the public. Both chamber, & around run of instance each town in the Online Countries, possessed a single, & took when its title occasionally fanciful or even heraldist sign. At Diest A Eyes of Christ, dated from either 1302, & an sooner a single, a Lily, is mentioned. A Alpha & Omega, at Ypres, was based astir 1398; that of a Violet, at Antwerp, followed witharound 1400; a Book, at Brussels, around 1401; a Berberry, at Courtrai, withwithwithAround 1427; a Holy Ghost, at Bruges, in 1428; a Floweret Jesse, at Middelburg, in 1430; a Oak, at Vlaardingen, in 1433; & the Marigold, at Gouda cheese, In 437. A virtually all celebrated of all the chambers, that of the Briar at Amsterdam, by using its catchword Within Liefde Bloeyeiule (Florescence infatuated), was non instituted until 1496. Among a virtually all influential chambers non above mentioned should exist as involved a Fountain at Dort, a Corn Flower at a Hague, a White Columbine at Leiden, a Blue Columbine at Rotterdam, a Red Rose at Schiedam, a Thistle at Zierikzee, Jesus using a Balsam at Ghent, & a Garland of Mary at Brussels. & non inside these significant web pages single, however inside. well-nigh each little town, the public speaker exerted their influence, principally around what i personally could call for a social counsel. Their wealth was around virtually all shells considerable, & it super presently became evident that there are no festival or even procession may choose place within a town unless the Karner patronized it. Towards a prevent of a 15th century a Ghent chamber of Jesus by owning the Balsam began to exercise a sovereign power across the more Flemish chambers, which was emulated afterwards within Holland per Sweetbriar at Amsterdam. However this official recognition proved of there is no symptom withwithwithin literature, & it was non in Ghent, however in Antwerp, that noetic life number 1 began to stir. Around Holl& a burghers lone formed a chambers, when within Flanders a representatives of a noble families were honorary members, and assisted by having their money at the arrangement of ecclesiastic or even political pageants. Their overblown landjuwcelen, or even tournaments of rhetoric, at which rich prizes were contended for, were ,a neat occasions upon which a members of the chambers distinguished themselves. Between 1426 & 1620 at least 66 one festivals were held. There was a specially splendid landjuweel at Antwerp Around 1496, where Twenty-eight chambers participate, however the gayest of everthing was that celebrated at Antwerp on the 3rd of August 1561. To this a Book at Brussels sent 340 members, entirely around horseback, & clad in crimion mantles. the town of Antwerp gave a ton of gold to become given inside prizes, which were shared among 1893 public speaker. This was a zenith of the splendour of the Kamers van Rhetorica, & fallowing this period it shortly fell into disfavour. I might trace a progress of literary composition under a chambers, although none of their official productions has descended to u.s.a.. Their spectacular pieces were surely of a didactical cast, by owning the hard ridiculous flavour, & continued the tradition of Maerlant & his school. It super seldom dealt by using historical or Biblical personages, however completely by having allegoric & moral abstractions, until a age of humanism introduced upon a stage a list forgoing very much of the spirit of mythology. Of a pure farces of the rhetorical chambers i may speak by owning however additional confidence, for a few of the two own came down to u.s., & among the authors illustrious for their skill therein kind of writing come known as Cornelis Everaert of Bruges & Laurens Janssen of Haarlem. a material one farces is highly raw, consisting of rough out poke fun the expense of priests & dopy hubby, silly old men & their lightly married woman. Laurens Janssen is as well meriting of remembrance for a caustic remark against the clergy, written within 1583. the chambers as well encouraged the composition of songs, however sustaining super little profits; it produced there is no lyrical genius additional considerable than Matthijs first state Casteleyn (1488-1550), a founder of the Flemish chamber of Pax Vobiscum at Oudenarfirst state, & creator of De Conste van Rhetorijcken (Ghent, 1573), a personage whose influence as a fashioner of language would use been additional hardy within case his astounding metric effort & harlequin tours de click experienced non been performed in a idiom debased by using all the worst bastard phrases of the Burgundian period of time.te)]] and Aernout, Vanden vos Reynaerde (satiric epic fable, around 1285)

Authors and works of importance
Anonymous, Karel ende Elegast (chivalric romance, between 1486 and 1488) Anonymous, Mariken van Nieumeghen (mystery play, around 1500) Diederic van Assenede, Floris ende Blancefloer ("Floris and Blanchefleur", exotic love epic, around 1260) Henric van Veldeke (courtly love poetry, twelfth century) Peter van Diest, Elckerlijc (morality play, late fifteenth century) Willem (die Madoc maecte) and Aernout, Vanden vos Reynaerde (satiric epic fable, around 1285)

The Golden Age (1550–1650)

In the middle of the 16th century a group of rhetoricians in Brabant and Flanders attempted to put a little new life into the stereotyped forms of the preceding age by introducing Houwae, in original composition the new-found branches of Latin and Greek poetry. The leader of these men was Jean Baptista Houwaert (1533-1599), a personage of considerable political influence in his generation. Houwaert held the title of Counsellor and Master in Ordinary of the Exchequer to the Dukedom of Brabant ; he played a prominent part in the revolution of the Low Countries against Spain; and when the prince of Orange entered Brussels victoriously (Sept. 23rd, 1577), Houwaert met him in pomp at the head of the two chambers of rhetoricthe Book and the Garland of Mary. He did not remain, faithful to his convictions, for he composed in 1593 a poem in honor of the cardinal-archduke Ernestof Austria, the governor of the Spanish Netherlands. He considered himself a devout disciple of Matthijs de Casteleyn, but his great characteristic was his unbounded love of classical and mythological fancy. His didactic poems are composed in a wonderfully rococo style, and swarm with misplaced Latinities. In his bastard Burgundian tongue he boasted of having poetelijck geInventeert ende rhetorijckeiijck ghecomponeert for the Brussels chamber such dramas as Aeneas and Dido, Mars and Venus, Narcissus and Echo, or Leander and Hero named together the Commerce of Amorosity (1583). But of all his writings, Pegasides Pleyn (Antwerp, 1582-1583), or the Palace of Maidens, is the most remarkable; this is a didactic poem in sixteen books, dedicated to a discussion of the variety of earthly love. Houwaerts contemporaries nicknamed him the Homer of Brabant ; later criticism has preferred to see in him an important link in that chain of homely didactic Dutch which ends in Cats. His writings are composed in a Burgundian so base that they hardly belong to Flemish literature at all. Into the same miserable dialect Cornelis van Ghistele of Antwerp translated, between 1555 and 1583, parts of Terence, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, while the painter Karel van Mander (1547-1609) put a French version of the Iliad and of the Eclog-ues of Virgil into an equally ill-fitting Flemish dress. In no country of Europe did the humanism of the 16th century at first affect the national literature so slightly or to so little purpose.

The stir and revival of intellectual life that arrived with the Reformation found its first expression in the composition of Psalms. The earliest printed collection appeared at Antwerp in 1540, under the title of Souter-Liedekens, and was dedicated to a Dutch nobleman, Willem van Zuylen van Nieuvelt, Psalms by whose name it is usually known. This collection, hymns. however, was made before the Reformation in Holland really set in. For the Protestant congregations Jan Utenhove printed a volume of Psalms in London in 1566; Lucas de Heere (1534-1585), and immediately after him, with much greater success, Petrus Datheen (1531-1590), translated the hymns of Clement Marot. For printing this last volume, in 1567, Herman Schinkel of Delft was burned to death in 1568. Datheen was not a rhetorician, but a person of humble origin, who wrote in the vulgar tongue, and his hymns spread far and wide among the people. Until 1773 they were in constant use in the state church of Holland. But the great events of the period of reformation are not marked by psalms only in Dutch literature. Two collections of hymns and lyrical pieces, printed in 1562 and 1569, perpetuate the fervour and despair of the martyrs of the Mennonite Church. Similar utterances of the persecuted Protestants were published at Haarlem and Leeuwarden, at Ghent and at Bruges. Very different in tone were the battle-songs of liberty and triumph sung a generaBattle- tion later by the victorious Reformers, the Geuzen songs. or Gueux (q.v.). The famous song-book of 1588, the Geusen Lieden Boecxken, was full of ardent and heroic sentiment, expressed often in marvellously brilliant phrases. In this collection appeared for the first time such classical snatches of Dutch song as the Ballad of I{eiigerlee, the Ballad of Egmond and Horn, and the song of the Storm of Leiden. The political ballads, with their ridicule of the Spanish leaders, form a section of the Boecxken which has proved of inestimable value to historians. All these lyrics, however, whether of victory or of martyrdom, are still very rough in form and language.

The first writer who used the Dutch tongue with grace and precision of style was a woman and a professed opponent of Lutheranism and reformed thought. Modern Dutch literature practically begins with Anna Bijns (c. 1494 1575). Against the crowd of rhetoricians and psalm- makers of the early part of the 16th century she stands out in relief as the one poet of real genius. The language, oscillating before her time between French and German, formless, corrupt and invertebrate, took shape and comeliness, which none of the male pedants could give it, from the impassioned hands of a woman. Anna Bijns, who is believed to have been born at Antwerp in 1494, was a schoolmistress at that city in her middle life, and in old age she still instructed youth in the Catholic religion. She died on the roth of April 1575. Hendrik Peppinck, a Franciscan, who edited her third volume of poems when she was an old woman in 1567, speaks of her as a maiden small of descent, but great of understanding, and godly of life. Her first known volume bears the date 1528, and displays her as already deeply versed in the mysteries of religion. We gather from all this that she was a lay nun, and she certainly occupied a position of great honor and influence at Antwerp. She was named the Sappho of Brabant and the Princess of all Rhetoricians. She bent the powerful weapon of her verse against the faith and character of Luther. In her volume of 1528 the Lutherans are scarcely mentioned; in that of 1538 every page is occupied with invectives against them; while the third volume of 1567 Is the voice of one from whom her age has passed. All the poems of Anna Bijns which we possess are called refereinen or refrains.i Her mastery over verse-form was extremely remarkable, and these refrains are really modified chants-royal. The writings of Anna Bijns offer many points of interest to the philologist. In her the period of Middle Dutch closes, and the modern Dutch begins. In a few grammatical peculiaritiessuch as the formation of the genitive by some verbs which now govern the accusative, and the use of ghe before the infinitiveher language still belongs to Middle Dutch; but these exceptions are rare, and she really initiated that modern speech which Filips van Marnix adopted and made classical in the next generation.

In Filips van Marnix, lord of St Aldegonde (1538-1598), a much greater personage came forward in the ranks of liberty and reform. He was born at Brussels in 1538, and began life M~.nlx as a disciple of Calvin and Beza in the schools of Geneva.

It was as a defender of the Dutch iconoclasts that he first appeared in print, with his tract on. The Images 1,/frown down in Holland in August 1566. He soon became one of the leading spirits in the war of Dutch independence, the intimate friend of the prince of Orange, and the author of the glorious Wilhelmuslied. It was in the autumn of 1568 that Marnix composed this, the national hymn of Dutch liberty and Protestantism. In 1569 he completed a no less important and celebrated prose work, the Biencorf or Beehive of the Romish Church. In this satire he was inspired in a great measure by Rabelais, of whom he was an intelligent disciple. It is written in prose that may be said to mark an epoch in the language and literature of Holland. Overwhelmed with the press of public business, Marnix wrote little more until in 1580 he published his Psalms of David newly translated out of the Hebrew Tongue. He occupied the last years of his life in preparing a Dutch version of the Bible, translated direct from the original. At his death only Genesis was found completely revised; but in 1619 the synod of Dort placed the unfinished work in the hands of four divines, who completed it.

In Dirck Volckertsen Coornhertf (1522-1590) Holland for the first time produced a writer at once eager to compose in his native tongue and to employ the weapons of Coornhes~ humanism. Coornhert was a typical burgher of North Holland, equally interested in the progress of national emancipation and in the development of national literature. He was a native of Amsterdam, but he did not take part in the labors of the old chamber of the Eglantine, but quite early in life proceeded to Haarlem, and was notary, secretary and finally pensionary of the town. In 1566 he was imprisoned for his support of the Reformers, and in 1572 he became secretary to the states of Holland. He practised the art of etching, and spent all his spare time in the pursuit of classical learning. He was nearly forty years of age before he made any practical use of his attainments. In 1561 he printed his translation. of the Dc officiis of Cicero, and in 1562 of the Dc beneficiis of Seneca. In these volumes he opposed with no less zeal than Marnix had done the bastard forms still employed in prose by the rhetoricians of Flanders and Brabant. During the next decade he occupied himself chiefly with plays and poems, conceived and expressed with far less freedom than his prose, and more in the approved conventional fashion of the rhetoricians; he collected his poems in 1575. The next ten years he occupied in polemical writing, from the evangelical point of view, against the Calvinists. In 1585 he translated Boethius, and then gave his full attention to his original masterpiece, the Zedekunst (, 586), or Art of Ethics, a philosophical treatise in prose, in which he studied to adapt the Dutch tongue to the grace and simplicity of Montaignes French. His humanism unites the Bible, Plutarch and Marcus Aurelius in one grand system of ethics, and is expressed in a style remarkable for brightness and purity. He died at Gouda on the 29th of October 1590; his works, in three enormous folio volumes, were first collected in 1630.

Towards the end of the I~eriod of transition, Amsterdam became the centre of all literary enterprise in Holland. In 1585 two of the most important chambers of rhetoric in AmsterFlanders, the White Lavender and the Fig dam the Tree, took flight from the south, and settled them- centreof selves in Amsterdam by the side of the Eglantine. letters.

The last-named institution had already observed the new tendency of the age, and was prepared to encourage intellectual reform of every kind, and its influence spread through Holland and Zealand. In Flanders, meanwhile, crushed under the yoke of Parma, literature and native thought absolutely expired. From this time forward, and until the emancipation of the southern prOvinces, the domain of our inquiry is confined to the district north of the Scheldt.

In the chamber of the Eglantine at Amsterdam two men took a very prominent place, more by their intelligence and S te he! modern spirit than by their original genius. Hendrick ~ Lauren~sen Spieghel (1549-1612) was a humanist of a type more advanced and less polemical than Coornhert. He wrote a charming poem in praise of dancing; but his chief contributions to literature were his Tweespraeck van de nederduytsche letterkunsi, a philological exhortation, in the manner of Joachim du Bellays famous tract, urging the Dutch nation to purify and enrich its tongue at the fountains of antiquity, and a didactic epic, entitled Hertspieghel (1614) ,i which has been greatly praised, but which is now much more antiquated in style and more difficult to enjoy than Coornherts prose of a similar tendency. That Spieghel was a Catholic prevented him perhaps from exercising as much public influence as he exercised privately among his younger friends. The same may be said of the man who, in 1614, first collected Spieghels writings, and published them in a volume with his own verses. Roemer Pieterssen Roe,,, r Visscheri (1547-1620) proceeded a step further than Vlsscher. Spieghel in the cultivation of polite letters. He was deeply tinged with a spirit of classical learning that was much more genuine and nearer to the true antique than any that had previously been known in Holland. His own disciples called him the Dutch Martial, but he was at best little more than an amateur in poetry, although an amateur whose function it was to perceive and encourage the genius of professional writers. Roemer Visscher stands at the threshold of the new Renaissance literature, himself practising the faded arts of the rhetoricians, but pointing by his counsel and his conversation to the naturalism of the great period.

It was in the salon at Amsterdam which the beautiful daughters of Roemer Visscher formed around their father and themselves that the new school began to take form. The republic of the United Provinces, with Amsterdam at its head, had suddenly risen to the first rank among the nations of Europe, and it was under the influence of so much new emotion and brilliant ambition that the country no less suddenly asserted itself in a great school of painting and poetry. The intellect of the whole Low Countries was concentrated in Holland and Zealand, while the six great universities, Leiden, Groningen, Ijtrecht, Amsterdam, Harderwijk and Franeker, were enriched by a flock of learned exiles from Flanders and Brabant. It had occurred, however, to Roemer Visscher only that the path of literary honor lay, not along the utilitarian road cut out by Maerlant and Boendale, but in the study of beauty and antiquity. In this he was curiously aided by the school of ripe and enthusiastic scholars who began to flourish at Leiden, such as Drusius, Vossius and Hugo Grotius, who themselves wrote little in Dutch, but who chastened the style of the rising generation by insisting on a pure and liberal Latinity. Out of that generation arose the greatest names in the literature of HollandVondel, Hoof t, Cats, Huygensin whose hands the language, so long left barbarous and neglected, took at once its highest finish and melody. By the side of this serious and aesthetic growth there is to be noticed a quickening of the broad and. farcical humour which had been characteristic of the Dutch nation from its commencement. For fifty years, and these the most glorious in the annals of Holland, these two streams of influence, one towards beauty and melody, the other towards lively comedy, ran side by side, often in the same channel, and producing a rich harvest of great works. It was in the house of the daughters of Roemer Visscher that the tragedies of Vondel and the comedies of Bredero, the farces of Coster and the odes of Huygens, alike found their first admirers and their best critics.

Of the famous daughters of Roemer, two cultivated literature with marked success. Anna (1584-1651) was the author of On Visscher and his daughters see N. Beets, Al de gedichten van Anna Roemers Visscher (1881), and E. Gosse, Studies in the Literature af _Tijorjhern Euroi,e (187q).

a descriptive and didactic poem, De Roemster van den Aemstel (The Glory of the Aemstel), and of various miscellaneous writings; Tesselschade (1594-1649) wrote some lyrics which still place her at the head of the female poets of Holland, and she translated the great poem of Tasso. daughters. They were women of universal accomplishment, graceful manners and singular beauty; and their company attracted to the house of Roemer Visscher all the most gifted youths of the time, several of whom were suitors, but in vain, for the hand of Anna or of Tesselschade.

Of this Amsterdam school, the first to emerge into public notice was Pieer Cornelissen Hooft (1581-1647). His Achilles and Polyxena (1598) displayed a precocious ease in the use of rhetorical artifices of style. In his pastoral drama of G~anida (1605) he proved himself a pupil of Guarini. In tragedy he produced Baelo and Geraad van Velsen; in history he published in 1626 his Life of Henry the Great, while from 1628 to 1642 he was engaged upon his master-work, the History of Holland. Hoof t desired to be a severe purist in style, and to a great extent he succeeded, but, like most of the writers of his age, he permitted himself too many Latinisms. In his poetry, especially in the lyrical and pastoral verse of his youth, he is full of Italian reminiscences both of style and matter; in his noble prose work he has set himself to be a disciple of Tacitus. Motley has spoken of Hoof t as one of the greatest historians, not merely of Holland, but of Europe. His influence in purifying the language of his country, and in enlarging its sphere of experience, can hardly be overrated.

Very different from the long and prosperous career of Hoof was the brief, painful life of the greatest comic dramatist that Holland has produced. Gerbrand Adriaanssen Bl-edei-~. Bredero3 (1585-1618), the son of an Amsterdam shoemaker, was born on the 16th of March 1585. He knew no Latin; he had no taste for humanism; he was a simple growth of the rich humour of the people. He entered the workshop of the painter Francisco Badens, but accomplished little in art. His life was embittered by a hopeless love for Tesselschade, to whom he dedicated his dramas, and whose beauty he celebrated in a whole cycle of love songs. His ideas on the subject of drama were at first a mere development Of the medieval Abelespelen. The Oude Kammer, one of the chambers of rhetoric, furnished an opening for his dramatic powers. He commenced by dramatiz.. ing the romance of Roderick and Alphonsus, in 1611, and Griane in 1612, but in the latter year he struck out a new and more characteristic path in his Farce of the Cow. From this time until his death he continued to pour out comedies, farces and romantic dramas, in all of which he displayed a coarse, rough genius not unlike that of Ben Jonson, whose immediate contemporary he was. His last and best piece was Jerolimo, the Spanish Brabanter, a satire upon the exiles from the south who filled the halls of the Amsterdam chambers of rhetoric with their pompous speeches and preposterous Burgundian phraseology. The piece was based on a Dutch version (Delft, 1609) of an early Spanish picaresque romance, La Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes (Burgos, 1554). Bredero was closely allied in genius to the dramatists of the Shakespearian age, but he founded no school, and stands almost as a solitary figure in the literature of Holland. He died on the 23rd of August 1618. Theodore Rodenburg(d. 1644), ridiculed by Bredero for his pretentiousness, had a wider knowledge of contemporary foreign literature than the other dramatists. He adapted some of the dramas of Lope de Vega, which he had witnessed at Madrid, into Dutch, and in 16,8 he adapted Cyril Tourneurs Revengers Tragedy.

The only individual at all clearly connected with Bredero in talent was Dr Samuel Coster, who was born at Amsterdam on the 16th of September 1579. He studied medicine at Leiden, and practised at Amsterdam. He is chiefly remembered for having been the first to take advantage of the growing dissension in the body of the old chamber of the Eglantine to form a new institution. In 1617 Coster founded what he called the First Dutch Academy. This was in fact a theatre, where, for the first time, dramas could be publicly acted under the patronage of no chamber of rhetoric. Coster himself had come before the world in 1612 with his farce of Teuwis the Boor, based on a folk-song in Jan Roulanss Liedekens Boeckh, and he continued this order of composition in direct emulation of Bredero, but with less talent. In 1615 he began a series of blood-and-thunder tragedies with his horrible Itys, and he continued this coarse style of tragic writing for several years. He survived at least until after 1648 as a supreme authority in Amsterdam upon all dramatic matters.

The first work of the greatest of all Dutch writers, Joost van den Vondel (1587-1679), was Het Pascha (1612), a tragedy or Vondel tragi-comedy on the exodus of the children of Israel, written, like all his succeeding dramas, on the recognized Dutch plan, in alexandrines, in five acts, and with choral interludes between the acts. There is comparatively little promise in Het Pascha. It was much inferior dramatically to the plays just being produced by Bredero, and metrically to the clear and eloquent tragedies and pastorals of Hoof t; but it secured the young poet a position inferior only to theirs. Yet for a number of years he made no attempt to emphasize the impression he had produced on the public, but contented himself during the years that are the most fertile in a poets life with translating and imitating portions of du Bartass popular epic. The short and brilliant life of Bredero, his immediate contemporary and greatest rival, burned itself out in a succession of dramatic victories, and it was not until two years after the death of that great poet that Vondel appeared before the public with a second tragedy, the Jerusalem laid Desolate. Five years later, in 1625, he published what seemed an innocent study from the antique, his tragedy of Palamedes, or Murdered Innocence. All Amsterdam discovered, with smothered delight, that under the name of the hero was thinly concealed the figure of Barneveldt, whose execution in 16i8 had been a triumph of the hated Calvillists. Thus, at the age of forty-one, the obscure Vondel became in a week the most famous writer in Holland. For the next twelve years, and tifi the accession of Prince Frederick Henry, Vondel had to maintain a hand-to-hand combat with the Saints of Dort. This was the period of his most resolute and stinging satires; Cats took up the cudgels on behalf of the counter-Remonstrants, and there raged a war of pamphlets in verse. A purely fortuitous circumstance led to the next great triumph in Vondels slowly developing career. The Dutch Academy, founded in 1617 almost wholly as a dramatic gild, had become so inadequately provided with stage accommodation that in 1638, having coalesced with the two chambers of the Eglantine and the White Lavender, it ventured on the erection of a large public theatre, the first in Amsterdam. Vondel, as the greatest poet of the day, was invited to write a piece for the first night; on the 3rd of January 1638 the theatre was opened with the performance of a new tragedy out of early Dutch history, the famous Gysbreght van Aemstel. The next ten years were rich in dramatic work from Vondels hand; he supplied the theatre with heroic Scriptural pieces, of which the general reader will obtain the best idea if we point to the Aihalie of Racine. In 1654, having already attained an age at which poetical production is usually discontinued by the most energetic of poets, he brought out the most exalted and sublime of all his works, the tragedy of Lucifer. Very late in life, through no fault of his own, financial ruin fell on the aged poet, and from 1658 to 1668 that is, from his seventieth to his eightieth year this venerable and illustrious person, the main literary glory of Holland through her whole history, was forced to earn his bread as a common clerk in a bank, miserably paid, and accused of wasting his masters time by the writing of verses. The city released him at last from this wretched bondage by a pension, and the wonderful old man went on writing odes and tragedies almost to his ninetieth year. He died at last in 1679, of no disease, having outlived all his contemporaries and almost all his friends, but calm, sane and good humoured to the last, serenely conscious of the legacy he left to a not too grateful country. Vondel is the typical example of Dutch intelligence and imagination at their highest development. Not merely is he to Holland all tbat Camoens is to Portugal and Mickiewicz to Poland, but he stands on a level with these men in the positive value of his writings.

Lyrical art was represented on its more spontaneous side by the songs and ballads of Jan Janssen Starter (b. 1594), an Englishman by birth, who was brought to Amsterdam. in his thirteenth year. Very early, in life he was made a member of the Eglantine, and he worked beside Bredero for two years; but in 1614 he wandered away to Leeuwarden, in Friesland, where he founded a literary gild, and brought out, in 1618, his plays Timbre de Cardone, Fenicie van Messine, the subject of which is identical with that of Shakespeares Much Ado about Nothing, and Daralda. But his great contribution to literature was his exquisite collection of lyrics, entitled the Friesche Lusthof, or Frisian Pleasance (1621). He returned to Amsterdam, but after 1625 we hear no more of him, and he is believed to have died as a soldier in Germany. The songs of Starter are in close relation to the lyrics of the English Elizabethans, and have the same exquisite simplicity and audacity of style.

While the genius of Holland clustered around the circle of Amsterdam, a school of scarcely less brilliance arose in Middelburg, the capital of Zealand. The ruling spirit of this school was the famous Jakob Cats (1577-1660). In this voluminous writer, to whom modern criticism almost denies the name of poet, the genuine Dutch habit of thought, the utilitarian and didactic spirit which we have already observed in Houwaert and in Boendale, reached its zenith of fluency and popularity. During early middle life he produced the most important of his writings, his pastoral of. Galathea, and his didactic poems, the Maechdenplichl and the Sinne- en MinneBeelden. In 1624 he removed from Middelburg to Dort, where he soon after published his tedious ethical work called Houwelick, or Marriage; and this was followed from time to time by one after another of his monotonous moral pieces. Cats is an exceedingly dull and prosaic writer, whose alexandrines roll smoothly on without any power of riveting the attention or delighting the fancy~ Yet his popularity with the middle classes in Holland has always been immense, and his influence extremely hurtful to the growth of all branches of literary art. Among the disciples of Cats, Jakob Westerbaen (1599-1670) was the most successful. His works included translations from Virgil, Ovid, Seneca, Terence and Juvenal, besides original poems. The Jesuit Adriaen Poirters (1606-1675) closely followed Cats in his remarkable Masquer of the World. A poet of Amsterdam, Jan Hermansz Krul (1602-1644), preferred to follow the southern fashion, and wrote didactic pieces in the Catsian manner.

A poet of dignified imagination and versatile form was Sir Constantijn Huygens (1596-1687), the diplomatist. He threw in his lot with the great school of Amsterdam, and fluy~ns. became the intifpate friend and companion of Vondel, Hoof t and the daughters of Roemer Visscher. His famous poem in praise of the Hague, Batava Tempe, appeared in 1622, and was, from a technical point of view, the most accomplished and elegant poem till that time produced in Holland. His collected poems, Otiorum libri sex, were printed in 1625. Oogentroost, or Eye Consolation, was the fantastic title of a remarkable poem dedicated in 1647 to his blind friend, Lucretia van Trello. He printed in 1654 a topographical piece describing his own mansion, Hofwijck. Huygens represents the direction in which it would have been desirable that Dutch literature, now completely founded by Hoof t and Vondel, should forthwith proceed, while Cats represents the tame and mundane spirit which was actually adopted by the nation. Huygens had little of the sweetness of Hoof t or of the sublimity of Vondel, but his genius was eminently bright and vivacious, and he was a consummate artist in metrical form. The Dutch language has never proved so light and supple in any hands as in his, and,he attempted no class of writing, whether in prose or verse, that he did not adorn by his delicate taste and sound judgment. A blind admiration for John Donne, whose poems he translated, was the greatest fault of Huygens, who, in spite of his conceits, remains one of the most pleasing of Dutch writers. In addition to all this he comes down to us with the personal recommendatiQn of having been one of the most lovable men that ever lived.

Three Dutchmen of the 17th century distinguished themselves very prominently in the movement of learning and philosophic Beicker thought, but the illustrious names of Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) and of Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) can scarcely be said to belong to Dutch literature. Balthasar Bekker (1634-1698), on the contrary, a Reformed preacher of Amsterdam, was a disciple of Descartes, who deserves to be remembered as the greatest philosophical writer who has used the Dutch language. His masterpiece, Betoverde Wereld, or the World Bewitched, appeared in 1691--I693. Bekker is popularly remembered most honorably by his determined attacks upon the system of a penal code for witchcraft.

From 1600 to 1650 was the blossoming time in Dutch literature. During this period the names of greatest genius were first made known to the public, and the vigour and grace of literary expression reached their highest development. It happened, however, that three men of particularly commanding talent survived to an extreme old age, and under the shadow of Vondel, Cats and Huygens there sprang up a new generation which sustained the great tradition until about 1680, when the final decline set in. Jan Vos (d. 1667) gained one illustrious success with his tragedy of Aaron and Titus in 1641,Vos. and lost still more in 1642 by his obscene farce of Oene.

Vondel, P.C. Hooft (also his Histories), Bredero, Jacob Cats, Muiderkring, Statenvertaling, Vonderslag

Decline and the French Era (1650–1815)

His second tragedy of Medea, in 1665, and his collected poems in 1662, supported his position as the foremost pupil of Vondel. Geeraerdt Brandt (1626-1685), the author of a History Braad~. of the Reformation (4 vols., 1671-1704), deserves remembrance less as a tragic dramatist than as a consummate biographer, whose lives of Vondel and of De Ruyter are among the masterpieces of Dutch prose. Johan Antonides van der Goes Goes (1647-1684) followed Vos as a skilful imitator of Vondels tragical manner. His Chinese tragedies, Tralil (1665) and Zungchin (1666), scarcely gave promise of the brilliant force and fancy of his Yslrooin, a poem in praise of Amsterdam, 1671. He died suddenly, in early life, leaving Anslo. unfinished an epic poem on the life of St. Paul. Reyer Anslo (1626-1669) marks the decline of taste and vigour; his once famous descriptive epic, The Plague at Naples, is singularly tame and rococo in style. Joachim Oudaen (1628- 1692) wrote in his youth two promising tragedies, Johanna Gray (1648) and Konradyn (1649). The Amsterdam section of the school of Cats produced Jeremias de Decker (1609-1666), author of The Praise of Avarice, a satirical poem in imitation of Erasmus, and Joannes Vollenhove (163 1 1708), voluminous writers of didactic verse. The engraver Jan I. iken Luiken (1649-1708) published in 1671 a very remarkable volume of poems. In lyrical poetry Starter had a single disciple, Daniel Jonctijs (1600-1652), who published a volume of love songs in 1639 under the affected and untranslatable title of Rooselijns ooc/ijens ontleed. None of these poets, except in some slight degree Luiken, set before himself any more ambitious task than to repeat with skill the effects of his predecessors.

Meanwhile the romantic and voluminous romances of the French school of Scudry and Honor dIJrf had invaded Holland and become fashionable. Johan van Heems!feems kerk. kerk (1597-1656), a councillor of the Hague, set himself to reproduce this product in native form, and published in 1637 his Batavian Arcadia, the first original Dutch romance, in which a party of romantic youths journey from the Hague to Katwijk, and undergo all sorts of romantic adventures. This book was extremely popular, and was imitated by Hendrik Zoeteboom in his Zaanlandsche Arcadia (1658), and by Lambertus Bos in his Dordtsche Arcadia (1662). A far more spirited and original romance is the Mirandor (1675) of Nikolaes Heinsius the younger (b. 1655), a book which rcsembles Gil Blas, and precedes it.

The drama fell into Gallicized hands at the death of Vondel and his immediate disciples. Lodewijck Meijer translated Corneille, and brought out his plays on the stage at Amsterdam, where he was manager of the national theatre or Schouwburg after Jan Vos. In connection with g~ Andries Pels (d. 1681), author of the tragedy of Didos Death, Meijer constructed a dramatic club, entitled Nil Volentibus Ardutim, the great object of which was to inflict the French taste upon the public. Pels furthermere came forward as the censor of letters and satirist of barbarism in Horaces Art of Poetry expounded, in 1677, and in his Use and Misuse of the Stage, in 1681. Willem van Focquenbroch (1640-1679) was the most voluminous comic writer of this period. The close of the century saw the rise of two thoroughly Gallican dramatists, Jan van Paffenrode (d. 1673) and Pieter Bernagie (1656-1699), who may not unfairly be compared respectively to the Englishmen Farquhar and Shadwell. Thomas Asselijn (1630-1695) was a writer of more considerable talent and more homely instincts. He attempted to resist the dictatorship of Pels, and to follow the national tradition of Bredero. He is the creator of the characteristic Dutch type, the comic lover, Jan Klaaszen, whom be presented on the stage in a series of ridiculous situations. Abraham Alewijn (b. 1664), author of Jan Los (1721), possessed a coarse vein of dramatic humour; he lived in Java, and his plays were produced in Batavia. Finally Pieter Langendijk, the author of a farce borrowed from Don Quixote, claims notice among the dramatists of this period, although he lived from 1683 to 1756, and properly belongs to the next century. With him the tradition of native comedy expired.

The Augustan period of poetry in Holland was even more blank and dull than in the other countries of northern Europe. Of the name preserved in the history of literature Decline of there are but very few that call for repetition here. poetry.

Arnold Hoogvliet (1687-1763) wrote a passable poem in honor of the town of Vlaardingen, and a terrible Biblical epic, in the manner of Blackmore, on the history of Abraham. Hubert Cornelissen Poot (1689I 733) showed an unusual love of nature and freshness of observation in his descriptive pieces. Sybrand Feitama(1694-1758),who translated Voltaires Henriade (1743), and wrote much dreary verse of the same class himself, is less worthy of notice than Dirk Smits (1702-1752), the mild and elegiac singer of Rotterdam. Tragic drama was more or less capably represented by Lucretia Wilhelmina van Merken (172 2 1789), wife of the very dreary dramatist Nicholaas Simon van Winter (1718-1795).

In the midst of this complete dissolution of poetical style, a writer arose who revived an interest in literature, and gave to Dutch prose the classical grace of the 18th century. Justus van Effen i (1684173 5) was born at Utrecht, ~ fell into poverty early in life, and was thrown very much among the company of French migrs, in connection with whom he began literary life in 1713 by editing a French journal. Coming to London just when the Tatler and Spectator were in their first vogue, Van Effen studied Addison deeply, translated Swift and Defoe into French, and finally determined to transfer the beauties of English prose Into his native language. It was not, however, until 1731, after having wasted the greater part of his life in writing French, that he began to publish his Hollandsche Spectator, which his death in 1735 soon brought to a close. Still, what he composed during the last four years of his life, in all its freshness, manliness and versatility, constitutes the most valuable legacy to Dutch literature that the middle of the ~ 8th century left behind it.

The supremacy of the poetical clubs in every town produced a very weakening and Della-Cruscan effect upon literature, from which the first revolt was made by the famous brothers Van 1See Dr W. Bisschop, Justus van Effen . - - (Titrecht, 1859).

Haren,1 so honorably known as diplomatists in the history of the Netherlands. Willem van Haren (1710-1768) wrote verses from The his earliest youth, while Onno Zwier van Haren (1713

brothers 1779), strangely enough, did not begin to do so until he Van had passed middle life. They were friends of Voltaire, listen, and they were both ambitious of success in epic writing, as understood in France at that period. Willem published in 1741 his Gevallen van Friso, a historical epos, and a long series of odes and solemn lyrical pieces. Onno, in a somewhat lighter strain, wrote Piet and Agnietje, or Pandoras Box, and a long series of tragedies in the manner of Voltaire. The baroness Juliana Cornelia de Lannoy (1738-1782) was a writer of Baroness considerable talent, also of the school of Voltaire; her ~annoy. poems were highly esteemed byBilderdijk, and she has a neatness of touch and clearness of penetration that give vivacity to her studies of social life. Jakobus Bellamy (1757, 1786) was the son of a Swiss baker at Flushing; his pompous B ~ odes (Gezangen myner Jeugd, 1782; Vaderlandsche e amy. G~angen, 1782) struck the final note of the false taste and Gallic pedantry that had deformed Dutch literature now for a century, and were for a short time excessively admired.

The year 1777 has been mentioned as the turning-point in the history of letters in the Netherlands. It was in that year that Elizabeth (Betjen) Wolff 2 (1738-1804), a widow lady in Amsterdam, persuaded her friend Agatha (Aagjen)

fjeken. Deken (1741-1804), a poor but extremely intelligent governess, to throw up her situation and live with her.

For nearly thirty years these women continued together, writing in combination, and when the elder friend died on the 5th of November 1804, her companion survived her only nine days. Madam Wolff had appeared as a poetess so early as 1762, and again in 175cr and 1772, but her talent in verse was by no means very remarkable. But when the friends, in the third year of their association, published their Letters on Divers Subjects, it was plainly seen that in prose their talent was very remarkable indeed. Since the appearance of Heinsiuss Mirandor more than a century had passed without any fresh start in novel-writing being made in Holland. In 1782 the ladies Wolff and Deken, inspired partly by contemporary English writers, and partly by Goethe, published their first novel, Sara Burgerhar. In spite of the close and obvious following of Richardson, this was a masterly production, and it was enthusiastically received. Another novel, Willem Leevend, followed in 1785, and Cornelia Wildschut in 1792. The ladies were residing in France at the breaking out of the Revolution, and they escaped the guillotine with difficulty. After this they wrote no more, having secured for themselves by their three unrivalled romances a place among the foremost writers of their country.

The last years of the 18th century were marked in Holland by a general revival of intellectual force. The romantic movement in Germany made itself deeply felt in all branches cz- of Dutch literature, and German lyricism took the place hitherto held by French classicism. Pieter Nieuwland (1764-1794) was a feeble forerunner of the revival, but his short life and indifferent powers gave him no chance of directing the transition that he saw to be inevitable. One volume of poems appeared in 1788, and a second, posthumously, in 1797.

The real precursor and creator of a new epoch in letters was the famous Willem Bilderdijk (1756-1831) (q.v.). This remarkable BllderdiJk man, whose force of character was even greater than his genius, impressed his personality on his generation so indelibly that to think of a Dutchman of the beginning of the ipth century is to think of Bilderdijk. In poetry his taste was strictly national and didactic; he began as a disciple of Cats, nor could he to the end of his life tolerate what he called the puerilities of Shakespeare. His early love-songs, collected in 1781 and 1785, gave little promise of talent, but in his epic of Elias in 1786, he showed himselfsuperior to all the Dutch poets since Huygens in mastery of form. For twenty years he lived a busy, eventful life, writing great quantities of verse, and then commenced his most productive period with his didactic poem of The Disease of Life Learned, in 1807; in 1808 he imitated Popes Essay on Man, and published the tragedy of Floris V., and in 1809 commenced the work which he designed to be his masterpiece, the epic of De Ondergang der eerste Wereld (The Destruction of the First World), which he never finished, and which appeared as a fragment in 1820. To the foreign student Bilderdijk is a~ singularly uninviting and unpleasing figure. He unites in himself all the unlovely and provincial features which deform the worst of his countrymen. He was violent, ignorant and dull; his view of art was confined to its declamatory and least beautiful side, and perhaps no writer of equal talent has shown so complete an absence of taste and tact. Ten Brink has summed up the character of Bilderdijks writings in an excellent passage: As an artist, he says, he can. perhaps be best described in short as the cleverest versemaker of the 18th century. His admirable erudition, his power over language, more extended and more colossal than that of any of his predecessors, enabled him to write pithy and thoroughly original verses, although the general tone of his thought and expression never rose above the ceremonious, stagy and theatrical character of the 18th century. But in spite of his outrageous faults, and partly because these faults were the exaggeration of a marked national failing, Bilderdijk long enjoyed an unbroken and unbounded popularity in Holland. Fortunately, however, a sounder spirit has arisen in criticism, and the prestige of Bilderdijk is no longer preserved so religiously.

Bilderdijks scorn for the dramas of Shakespeare was almost, rivalled by that he felt for the new German poetry. Notwithstanding his opposition, however, the romantic fervour found its way into Holland, and first of all in the persons of Hieronymus van Alphen (1746-1803) and Pieter Leonard van de Kastiele (1748-1810), who amused themselves by composing funeral poems of the school of Gessner and Blair. Van Alphen at one time was extolled as a writer of verses for children, but neither in this nor in the elegiac line did he possess nearly so much talent as Rhijnvis Feith (1753-1824), burgomaster of Zwolle, the very type of a prosperous and sentimental Dutchman. In his Juli1 (1783), a prose romance, Feith proved himself as completely the disciple of Goethe in Werther as Wolff and Deken had been of Richardson. in Sara Burgerhart. In Johannes Kinker (1764 1845) a comic poet arose who, at the instigation of Bilderdijk, dedicated himself to the ridicule of Feiths sentimentalities. The same office was performed with more dignity and less vivacity by Baron W. E. van Perponcher (174118 19), but Feith continued to hold the popular ear, and achieved an immense success with his poem The Grave in 1792. lIe then produced tragedies for a while, and in 1803 published Antiquity, a didactic epic. But his popularity waned before his death, and he was troubled by the mirth of such witty scoffers as Arend Fokke Simons (1755-1812), the disciple of Klopstock, and as P. de Wacker van Zon (1758-1818), who, in a series of very readable novels issued under the pseudonym of Bruno Daalberg, sharply ridiculed the sentimental and funereal school.

Under the Batavian republic a historian of great genius arose in the person of Johannes Henricus van der Palm (1763-1840), whose brilliant and patriotic Gedenkschrift van Nederlands Herstelling (1816) has somewhat obscured ;jIder his great fame as a politician and an Orientalist. The work commenced by Van der Palm in prose was continued inverse by Cornelis Loots (1765-1834) and Jan Frederik Helmers (1767-1813). Loots, in his Batavians of the Time of ~

Caesar (1805), read his countrymen a lesson in patriot- 00

ism, which Helmers far exceeded in originality and force by his Dutch Nation in 5812. Neither of these poets, however, had sufficient art to render their pieces classical, or, indeed, lielmers. enough to protect thei~n during their lifetime from the sneers of Bilderdijk. Other political writers, whose lyrical energies were stimulated by the struggle with France, were Maurits Cornelis van. Hall (1768-1858), Samuel Iperuszoon Wiselius (1769-1845) and Jan ten Brink (1771-1839), the second of whom immortalized himself and won the favor of Bilderdijk by ridiculing the pretensions of such frivolous tragedians as Shakespeare and Schiller.

The healthy and national spirit in, which the ladies Wolff and Deken had written was adopted with great spirit by a novelist , / in the next generation, Adriaan Loosjes (1761-1818), OOS es. a bookseller at Haarlem. His romantic stories of medieval life, especially his Charlotte van Bourbon, are curiously like shadows cast forward by the Waverley Novels, but he has little of Sir Walter Scotts historical truth of vision. His production was incessant and his popularity great for many years, but he was conscious all through that he was at best but a disciple of the authoresses of Sara Burgerhart. Another disciple whose name should not be passed over is Maria Jacoba de Neufville (1775-1856), author of Little Duties, an excellent story somewhat in the manner of Mrs Opie.

A remarkable poet whose romantic genius strove to combine the power of Bilderdijk with the sweetness of Feith was Hendrik ToIIenS. Tollens (1780-1856), whose verses have shown more vitality than those of most of his contemporaries. He struck out the admirable notion of celebrating the great deeds of Dutch history in a series of lyrical romances, many of which possess a lasting charm. Besides his folk-songs and popular ballads, he succeeded in a long descriptive poem, A Winter in Nova Zembla, 1819. He lacks the full accomplishment of a literary artist, but his inspiration was natural and abundant, and he thoroughly deserved the popularity with which his patriotic M h s~ ballads were rewarded. Willem Messchert (1790 CSSC ~ 1844), a friend and follower of Tollens, pushed the domestic and familiar tone of the latter to a still further point, especially in. his genre poem of the Golden Wedding, 1825. Both these writers were natives and residents of Rotterdam, which also claims the honor of being the birthplace of B Adrianus Bogaers (1795-1870), the most considerable ogaers. poetical figure of the time. Without the force and profusion of Bilderdijk, Bogaers has more truth to nature, more sweetness of imagination, and a more genuine gift of poetry than that clamorous writer, and is slowly taking a higher position in Dutch literature as Bilderdijk comes to take a lower one Bogaers printed his famous poem Jochebed in 1835, but it had then been in existence more than thirteen years, so that it belongs to the second period of imaginative revival in Europe, and connects the name of its author with those of Byron and Heine. Still more beautiful was his Voyage of Heemskerk to Gibraltar (1836), in which he rose to the highest level of his genius. In 1846 he privately printed his Romances and Ballads. Bogaers had a great objection to publicity, and his reputation was long delayed by the secrecy with which he circulated his writings among a few intimate friends. A poet of considerable talent, whose powers were awakened by personal intercourse with Bogaers and SM~n Tollens, was Antoni Christiaan Winand Staring (1767

g. 1840), who first at the age of fifty-three came before the world with a volume of Poems, but who continued to write till past his seventieth year. His amorous and humorous lyrics recall the best period of Dutch song, and are worthy to be named beside those of Starter and Vondel.

After 1830 Holland took a more prominent position in European thought than she could claim since the end of the I7th century. Van Alphen, Wolff en Deken French era -> spelling reform of Siegenbeek and counter-reaction by Bilderdyk

The Old Guard (1815–1880)
In scientific and religious literature her men of letters 19th showed themselves cognizant of the newest shades ces. of opinion, and freely ventilated their ideas. The language resisted the pressure of German from the outside, and from within broke through its long stagnation and enriched itself, as a medium for literary expression, with a multitude of fresh and colloquial forms. At the same time, no very great genius arose in Holland in any branch of literature. The vast labors of Jakobus van Lennep (1802-1868) consist of innumerable translations, historical novels and national romances, which have gained for him the title of the leader of the Dutch romantic school.

The novels of Sir Walter Scott had a great influence on Dutch literature, and the period was rich in historical novels. J. van der Hage (1806-1854), who wrote under the pseudonym of Jan Frederick Oltmans, was the author of the famous novels, Castle Loevenstein in 1570 (1834), and The Shepherd (1838), both dealing with the national history. Other popular works were the antique romance Charikles and Euphorion (1831) of Petrus van Limburg-Brouwer (1795-1847), author of a history of Greek mythology; the Mejufrouw Leclerc (1849), and the Portretten van Joost van den Vondel (1876) of the literary historian and critic J. A. A. Alberdingk Thijm (1820-1899); the Jan Faessen (1856) of Lodewijk Mulder (b., 1822); and the Lucretia dEste of W. P. Walters (1827-1891). Johannes Kneppelhout (1814-1885) sketched university life at Leiden in two amusing volumes of Studententypen (1841) and Studentenleven (1844). Reinier Cornelis Bakhuizen van den Brink (1810-1865) was the chief critic of the romantic movement, and Everhard Johannes Potgieter (18o8I875) its mystical philosopher and esoteric lyrical poet. The genius and influence of Potgieter were very considerable, but they were exceeded by the gifts of Nicolaes Beets (q.v.), author of the famous Camera Obscura (1836), a masterpiece of humour and character. Johannes Pieter Hasebroek (18 121896), who has been called the Dutch Charles Lamb, wrote in 1840 an admirable collection of essays entitled Truth and Dreams. Willem Hofdijk (1816-1888) wrote a collection of ballads, Kennemerl and (1849-1852), and a series of epic and dramatic poems in the romantic style. Bernard ter Haar (1806-1881), an Amsterdam pastor and, in the last year of his life, a professor at Utrecht, made a reputation. as a poet by his Johannes and Thea genes, a legend of apostolic times (1838). His poems were collected in. 1866 and 1879. A poet of unusual power and promise was lost in the early death of Pieter Augustus de Genestet (1803 1861). His Eve of Saint Nicholas appeared in 1849, and was followed by two volumes of verse in 1851 and 1861, the second of which contains some poems that have attained great popularity. Among the poets should not be forgotten. two writers of verse for children, Jan Pieter Heije (1809-1876) and J. J. A. Gouverneur (1809-1889). Criticism was represented by W. J. A. Jon.ckbloet (1817-1885), author of an excellent History of Dutch Literature (1868-1870), C. Busken Huet, and Jan ten Brink (1834-1901), author of a great number of valuable works on literary history, notably of a history of Dutch literature (1897), and a series of biographies of r9th century Dutch writers (new edition, 902). His novels were collected in 13 volumes in 1885. With Isaak da Costa (q.v.), W. J. van Zeggelen (1811-1879), and J.J.L. Ten Kate (q.v.), the domestic tendency of Cats and Bilderdijk overpowered the influence of romanticism. The romantic drama found its best exponent in H. J. Schimmel (q.v.), who found a disciple in D. F. van Heyst (b. 1831), whose George van Lalaing was produced in 1873. Hugo Beijerman. (ps. Glanor) produced a good play in his Uitgaan (1873), which was followed by other successes. Rosier Faessen (b. 1833) published his dramatic works in 1883.

Dominees, Beets/Hildebrand, Potgieter, Piet Paaltjens, Schoolmeester, Bilderdyk, Conscience, Gezelle, Multatuli

Tachtigers (1880–1920)
The 19th century literature of Holland presents the interesting phenomenon of an aesthetic revolution, carefully and cleverly planned, crowned with unanticipated success, and dying away in a languor encouraged by the complete absence of organized resistance. It would perhaps be difficult to point to another European example so well defined of the vicissitudes which keep the history of literature varied and fresh. For the thirty or forty years preceding 1880 the course of literature in Holland was smooth and even sluggish. The Dutch writers had slipped into a conventionality of treatment and a strict limitation of form from which even the most striking talents among them could scarcely escape. In 1880 the most eminent authors of this early period were ready to pass away, and they appeared to be preparing no successors to take their place. The greatest humorist of Holland, Nicolaas Beets, had drawn his works together. The most interesting novelist, Mrs Gertrude Bosboom-Toussaint, had in her last psychological stories shown an unexpected sympathy with new ideas. M. G. L. van Loghem (b. 1849), known under the pseudonym of Fiore delie Neve, made a great success by his Een iiefde in het Zuiden (1881), followed in 1882 by Liana, and in 1884 by Van eene Sultane. Among the novelists were Gerard Keller (b. 1829), author of From Home (1867); Johan Gram (b. 1833), of whose novels De Familie Schaffels (1870) is the best known; Hendrik de Veer (1829-1890), author of Frans Holster (1871); Justus van Maurik (b. 1846), who wrote plays and short sketches of Amsterdam life (Uit /zet Volk, 1879), and Arnold Buning (b. 1846), whose Marine Sketches (1880) won great popularity. The colonial novels of N. Marie C. Sloot, born in Java in 1853, are widely read in Holland and Belgium, and many of them have been translated into German. A number of them were collected (Schiedam, 1900-1902) as Romantische Werken. Adele Opzoomer (b. 1856; pseud. A. C. S. Wallis) made her first success in 1877 with In Days of Strife. The two leading Dutch men of letters, however, besides Beets and Douwes Dekker, were critics, Conrad Busken-Huet (q.v.) and Carel Vosmaer (q.v.). In Huet the principles of the 1840-1880 period were summed up; he had been during all those years the fearless and trusty watch-dog of Dutch letters, as he understood them. He lived just long enough to become aware that a revolution was approaching, not to comprehend its character; but his accomplished fidelity to literary principle and his wide knowledge have been honored even by the most bitter of the younger school. Vosmaer, although in certain directions more sympathetic than Huet, and himself an innovator, has not escaped so easily, because he has been charged with want of courage in accepting what he knew to be inevitable.

In November 1881 there died a youth named Jacques Perk (1860-1881), who had done no more than publish a few sonnets in the Spectator, a journal published by Vosmaer. He was no sooner dead, however, than his posthumous poems, and in particular a cycle of sonnets called Mathilde, were published (1882), and awakened extraordinary emotion. Perk had rejected all the formulas of rhetorical poetry, and had broken up the conventional rhythms. There had been heard no music like his in Holland for two hundred years. A group of young men, united in a sort of esoteric adoration of the memory of Perk, collected around his name. They joined to their band a man somewhat older than themselves, Marcellus Emants (born 1848), poet, novelist and dramatist, who had come forward in. 1879 with a symbolical poem called Lilith, which had been stigmatized as audacious and meaningless; encouraged by the admiration of his juniors, Emants published in 1881 a treatise on Young Holland; in the form of a novel in which the first open attack was made on the old school. The next appearance was that of Willem Kloos (born 1857), who had been the editor and intimate friend of Perk, and who now undertook to lead the army of rebellion. His violent attacks on recognized authority in aesthetics began in 1882, and created a considerable scandal. For some time, however, the new poets and critics found a great difficulty in being heard, since all the channels of periodical literature were closed to them, But in 1883 Emants expressed his intellectual aspirations in his poem The Twilight of the Gods, and in 1884 the young school founded a review, De Nieuwe Gids, which was able to offer a direct challenge to Dc Gids, the ultrarespectable Dutch quarterly. In this year a new element was introduced: hitherto the influences of the young Dutch poetry had chiefly come from England; they were those of Shelley, Mrs Browning, the Rossettis. In 1884 Frans Netscher began to imitate with avidity the French naturalists. For some time, then, the new Dutch literature became a sort of mixture of Shelley and Zola, very violent, heady and bewildering. In 1885 the Perse phone and other Poems of Albert Verwey (b. 1865) introduced a lyrical poet of real merit to Holland; Emants published his novel Goudakkers Illusions. This was the great flowering moment of the new school. It was at this juncture that the principal recent writer of Holland, Louis Couperus (b. 1863), made his first definite appearance. Born in the Hague, the opening years of his boyhood were spent in Java, and he had preserved in all his nature a certain tropical magnificence. In 1884 a little volume of lyrics, and in 1886 the more important Orchids, showed in Couperus a poet whose sympathies were at first entirely with the new school. But he was destined to be a novelist, and his earliest story, Eline Vere (1889). already took him out of the ranks of his contempoiaries. In i8oo he published Destiny (known as Footsteps of Fate in the English version), and in 1892 Ecstasy. This was followed in 1894 by Majesty, in 1896 by World-wide Peace, in 1898 by Metamorphosis, a delicate study of character, in 1899 by Fidessa, ill 1901 by Quiet Force, and in 1902 by the first volume of a tetralogy called The Books of Small Souls. Of all these later books, some of which have been translated into English, by Couperus, it is perhaps Ecstasy in which the peculiar quality of his work Is seen at present to the greatest advantage. This is an extreme sensitiveness to psychological phenomena, expressed in terms of singular delicacy and beauty. The talent of Couperus is like a rich but simple tropical flower laden with color and odour. He separated himself, as he developed, from the more fanatical members of the group, and addressed himself to the wider public. Another writer, of a totally different class, resembling Couperus only in his defiance of the ruling system of aesthetics, is the prominent, Ultramontane politician and bishop, E. j. A. M. Schaepmann (born 1844), whose poem of Aja Sofia originally appeared in 1886. Recent novelists of some polemical vigour are H. Borel and van Hulzen. A very delightful talent was revealed by Frederick van Eeden in Little Johnny (1887), a prose fairy-tale; in Ellen (1891), a cycle of mysterious and musical elegies; and in From the Cold Pools of Death (1901), a very melancholy novel. Another poet of lees refinement of spirit, but even greatersumptuousness of form, appeared in Helene Swarth-Lapidoth (born 1859), whose Pictures and Voices belongs to 1887. In that year also, in which Dutch literature reached its height of fecundity, was published the powerful and scandalous naturalistic novel, A Love, by L. van Deyssel (K. J. L. Alberdingk Thijm) who had hitherto been known chiefly as a most uncompromising critic. After 1887 the condition of modern Dutch literature remained comparatively stationary, and within the last decade of the Ith century was definitely declining. In 1889, it is true, a new poet Herman Gorter, made his appearance with a. volume of strange verses called May, eccentric both in prosody and in treatment. He held his own without any marked advance towards lucidity or variety. Since the recognition of Gorter, however, no really remarkable talent has made itself prominent in Dutch poetry, unless we except P. C. Boutens, whose Verses in 1898 were received with great respect. Willem Kloos, still the acute and somewhat turbulent leader of the school, collected his poems in 1894 and his critical essays in 1896. L. van Deyssel, though an effective reviewer, continued to lack the erudition which years should have brought to him. Gorter remained tenebrous, Helene Swarth-Lapidoth still gorgeous; the others, with the exception of Couperus, showed symptoms of sinking into silence. The entire school, now that the struggle for recognition is over, and its members are accepted as little classics and the tyrants of taste, rests on its triumphs and seems to limit itself to a repetition of its old experiments. The leading dramatist of the close of the century was Hermann Heijermans (b. 1864), a Jew of strong realistic and socialistic tendencies, and the author of innumerable gloomy plays. His Ghetto (1898) and Ora et Labora (19o1) particularly display his peculiar talent. Other notable products of drama are those of de Koo, whose Tobias Bolderman (1900) and Vier Ton (1901) are effective comedies. Dutch literature presented features of remarkable interest between 1882 and 1888, but since that time the general heightening of the average of merit, the abandonment of the old dry conventions, and a recognition of the artistic value of words and forms, are more evident to a foreign observer than any very important single expression. of the national genius in literary art. An exception should be made in favor of the powerful peasant-stories of Steijn Streuvels (Frank Lateur), a young baker by trade, whose Summer Land (1901) was a most promising production.

Among the novelists were Gerard Keller (b. 1829), author of From Home (1867); Johan Gram (b. 1833), of whose novels De Familie Schaffels (1870) is the best known; Hendrik de Veer (1829-1890), author of Frans Holster (1871); Justus van Maurik (b. 1846), who wrote plays and short sketches of Amsterdam life (Uit /zet Volk, 1879), and Arnold Buning (b. 1846), whose Marine Sketches (1880) won great popularity. The colonial novels of N. Marie C. Sloot, born in Java in 1853, are widely read in Holland and Belgium, and many of them have been translated into German. A number of them were collected (Schiedam, 1900-1902) as Romantische Werken. Adele Opzoomer (b. 1856; pseud. A. C. S. Wallis) made her first success in 1877 with In Days of Strife. The two leading Dutch men of letters, however, besides Beets and Douwes Dekker, were critics, Conrad Busken-Huet (q.v.) and Carel Vosmaer (q.v.). In Huet the principles of the 1840-1880 period were summed up; he had been during all those years the fearless and trusty watch-dog of Dutch letters, as he understood them. He lived just long enough to become aware that a revolution was approaching, not to comprehend its character; but his accomplished fidelity to literary principle and his wide knowledge have been honored even by the most bitter of the younger school. Vosmaer, although in certain directions more sympathetic than Huet, and himself an innovator, has not escaped so easily, because he has been charged with want of courage in accepting what he knew to be inevitable.

The Tachtigers, otherwise known as the Movement of Eighty (Beweging van Tachtig), was a highly influential, innovative, and radical group of writers who interacted and worked together in Amsterdam in the 1880's, and many of whom are still widely read today.

The Tachtigers ("Eightiers" in English) were so named simply because they became active around the year 1880. The movement was based on revolt against what the Tachtigers perceived as the formalistic and overly wrought style of mainstream literature in their day, particularly as favored by the predominant literary journal in Amsterdam, The Guide (De Gids). The Tachtigers instead insisted that style must match content, and that intimate and visceral emotions can only be expressed using an intimate and visceral writing style. For guidance in this effort, they tended to draw inspiration from Shakespeare, and from the then recent Impressionist painters and Naturalist writers.

After The Guide continued to reject most of their submissions, the Tachtigers founded their own competing literary journal, mockingly called The New Guide (De Nieuwe Gids), first published in October 1885. Two of the founding editors and frequent contributors were the poet and critic Willem Kloos, and the poet, novelist, playwright, essayist and psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden, both of whom are widely regarded today as canonical greats of Dutch literature. The other three founding editors of The New Guide were F. van der Goes, Willem Paap, and Albert Verwey. Other prominent Tachtigers, whose works appeared in The New Guide, include the literary critic Lodewijk van Deyssel; and the novelist Herman Gorter, who is probably the most widely read Tachtiger, and who went on to become a founding member of the world's first Communist political party, the Dutch Social-Democratic Party, in 1909.

Another prominent novelist, Louis Couperus, published his first novel in 1889 and was deeply influenced by the Tachtigers, and is often counted as a Tachtiger, although he was outside the Amsterdam social circle of the true Tachtigers.

Interbellum and the Second World War (1920–1945)
Marsman Roland Holst J.J. Slauerhoff Hendrik de Vries Vestdijk Ter Braak Du Perron Jan Campert Paul Van Ostaijen Jac. van Looy Nescio Willem Elsschot

Modern Times (1945–present)
Vijftigers, Hans Lodeizen, Lucebert, Jules Deelder, J.Bernlef, Remco Campert, Hella Haasse, M. Vasalis, Leo Vroman, Hugo Claus, Harry Mulisch, Willem Frederik Hermans, Gerard Reve, Jan Wolkers, Rudy Kousbroek, Cees Nooteboom, Maarten 't Hart, A.F.Th van der Heijden, Rutger Kopland, Gerrit Krol, Gerrit Komrij, Connie Palmen, Tom Lanoye