Biographical Notes
Johannes August Frederik (Hans) Lodeizen was born in Naarden in 1924, and died in Lausanne in 1950 of leukaemia.
He grew up in an educated and well-to-do home environment with many books and a strong French cultural orientation. He began writing poetry at an early age.
After World War II he studied law for a short time at the University of Leiden. He further studied biology at Amherst College, Mass. from 1947 to 1948, but returned to Holland after loosing interest in a career as a specialised biologist. At Amherst he befriended the poet James Merrill.
Till his death, Lodeizen worked, somewhat reluctantly, for his father's company Müller & Co.
Shortly after his death, the volume Het innerlijk behang was published in the series the Vrije Bladen. The poems in this publication were selected by the author before his death. Unfortunately the volume contained several inaccuracies.
In 1954, G.A. van Oorschot published Het innerlijk behang en andere gedichten in which three Dutch authors: J.C. Bloem, J. Greshoff, and A, Morriën added a selection of then yet unpublished poems. This volume follows the typography prescribed by the author. Het innerlijk behang contains poems from different years. The additional poems are placed in chronological order, except when the poet had already followed a different order.
In 1969, G.A. van Oorschot published Nagelaten Werk, a further selection of yet unpublished poetry and prose. This volume added little that was new to Lodeizen's poetry and contains primarily fragments. The prose work shows that Lodeizen might have developed into one of Holland's more powerful writers.
The translations of the poems, and excerpts of poems in this essay, are mine and I hope that by rendering them into English not too much was lost of the original.