MUSE

Being a poet is, I think, something more than writing, and publishing, verses. Being a poet is more than an appointment and even a fight with the Muse. (…) Being a poet is a style and a content of life.

Herman van den Bergh





www.alberthagenaars.nl


Also see:
Dutch poetry in Indonesian language, translated by Siti Wahyuningsih and Albert Hagenaars

Critical reviews on modern Dutch poetry

ACHIEVEMENT

I don't imagine anything about everything I've done as a poet. But the fact that I am the only one in my century who knows the right thing in the complicated science of color theory is something which makes me proud.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe





www.alberthagenaars.nl


Also see:
Dutch poetry in Indonesian language, translated by Siti Wahyuningsih and Albert Hagenaars

Critical reviews on modern Dutch poetry





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MEANING (3)

Anyone who asks about the meaning of a poem wants to know more about it than the poet himself. The meaning of a poem is the poem itself and can only be the poem itself.

Georges Perros





What one admires in good poetry, is craftsmanship. Poets don't look at each other for some philosophical meaning they give to life but they look at technical skills. Workmanship of the medium, that is what can be appreciated with others.

Derek Walcott





More than ever before poetry offers meaning, because it is not troubled by vague definitions about social relevance or calculable efficiency. Poetry is imagination and the world never has enough of that.

Koen Van Bockstal





www.alberthagenaars.nl


Also see:
Dutch poetry in Indonesian language, translated by Siti Wahyuningsih and Albert Hagenaars

Critical reviews on modern Dutch poetry

MOUTHPIECE

The poet is a maker, not a retail trader. The writer today should be not so much the mouthpiece of a community (for then he will only tell it what it knows already) as its conscience, its critical faculty, its generous instinct.

Louis MacNeice





www.alberthagenaars.nl


Also see:
Dutch poetry in Indonesian language, translated by Siti Wahyuningsih and Albert Hagenaars

Critical reviews on modern Dutch poetry

MILES

Time is money is miles is experiences is poetry is time.

Albert Hagenaars





www.alberthagenaars.nl


Also see:
Dutch poetry in Indonesian language, translated by Siti Wahyuningsih and Albert Hagenaars

Critical reviews on modern Dutch poetry

BACH

Twofold belief and twofold truth: Bach and Baudelaire.

Clem Schouwenaars





www.alberthagenaars.nl


Also see:
Dutch poetry in Indonesian language, translated by Siti Wahyuningsih and Albert Hagenaars

Critical reviews on modern Dutch poetry

DOMINION

A poem is not a deposit of feelings, but a begetter of emotion. As such the committed poem belongs to the domain of applied arts and not, of course, to the dominion of poetry.



Henri-Floris Jespers
From: Het bed van Procrustes, publisher Walter Soethoudt, Antwerp, 1978
Sent by Bert Bevers





www.alberthagenaars.nl


Also see:
Dutch poetry in Indonesian language, translated by Siti Wahyuningsih and Albert Hagenaars

Critical reviews on modern Dutch poetry