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Like the work of his friend at Amherst College, James Merrill, Lodeizen's work is autobiographic in character. Both authors use the vocabulary of daily activity and conversation in their verse. In doing this Lodeizen broke with existing traditions in the literary world in Holland.
Lodeizen has been "fitted" into the Dutch group of poets known as the Beweging van Vijftig, loosely translated as the "Fifties Generation". These poets were considered to be experimental and avant-garde, literary terms covering a wide variety of styles characterised by experiments in typography, word-sound and subject matter. But Lodeizen does not "fit" into the mould of this Beweging van Vijftig. He lacks the social motivation, the animosity, and the eagerness with which the Beweging van Vijftig attacked the "vriendelijke onder-onsjes" the "cosy-arrangements" within Dutch literary circles at the time. Lodeizen of all things is non-engagé and is too, almost exclusively, concerned with himself. The colloquial idioms and the prose rhythms in his style do not serve to fight existing social ethical principles but are used to contrast reality and dream and to veil buried feelings so that the reader can only discover after he has removed the layers of almost misleading casual observations. This is shown instance in the last part of the poem Gezichtsbedrog (Optical Illusion).
de zondagochtendklok
die op de zon klepelt als een citroen
de wolken van vrijdagavond
waar het weekend in wegvaart
met onze wandelschoenen
over de Velperhei in de nazomer
de lusteloosheid
gedragen als een oud costuum |
the sunday morning bell
which clappers on the sun like a lemon
the clouds of friday evening
in which the weekend drifts away
with our hiking-shoes
over the Velper heath in late summer
the listlessness
worn like an old suit |
The big difference between Lodeizen's work and that of Merrill is that the death of the Dutch poet prevented him to develop beyond a young man's view of the world. Furthermore, his illness made Lodeizen preoccupied with death.
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JAMES MERRILL in 1944
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Merrill dedicated to Lodeizen the volume of poetry called The Country of Thousand Years of Peace, named after the poem, which describes Lodeizen' s dying in Lausanne: "Here they all come to die...", contrasting the useless death of a gifted young man with the "glittering neutrality of clock and chocolate" Switzerland. Lodeizen is also the "necessary angel" in the volume and is again the tutelary figure in the later Book of Ephraim. Furthermore, the title poem and final dedicatory verse of Country are addressed to him by Merrill. In 1962, the editors of a book called Poet's Choice asked the most celebrated living poets writing in English to name the poem from their own work that meant the most to them and to give reasons for their choice. James Merrill selected The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace ."It was my first deeply felt death," Merrill explains. "As the inevitable verses took shape, strictness of form seemed at last beside the point .... The poem still surprises me, as much by its clarification of what I was feeling, as by its foreknowledge of where I needed to go next, in my work." |
The final poem in The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace and Other Poems is "A Dedication" to Lodeizen, which ends with the eloquent lines:
There are moments when speech is but a mouth pressed
Lightly and humbly against the angel's hand.
Whereas Lodeizen' s death was for Merrill the confrontation with "that starry land under the world, which no one sees", for Lodeizen his terminal illness was the choking threat that dominates the poetry of his later years.
Although he could, at times, deal with his fear ironically, as in
morgen ben je dood; een glimlach
zul je sturen naar deze verzen
die erop wachten zullen als op
een telegram. Laat de postbode
die met je laatste uren holt
geen onheilstijding brengen.
leef. Versplinter de spiegel
waarin je gezicht heeft gehuild. |
tomorrow you'll be dead; a smile
you will mail to these verses
which will wait for it as for
a cable. Let the mailman
who's running with your last hours
not bring a message of disaster.
live. Shatter the mirror
in which your face has cried. |
the poem nevertheless ends with a desperate cry against fate.
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