Jacques Perk by René Breugelmans (review)

HUMANITIES 405 and individual.' The advantage of such a procedure is that it proves essentially flexible. Vitalism takes many forms, and although it seems (ironically) to encourage the erection of systems, it does not dictate sameness. As a result the critic is able to offer some thought-provoking interconnections without recreating, say, Lawrence in Blake's image. Moreover, vitalism becomes the Ariadne-thread that keeps both critic and reader from losing their bearings in a complex labyrinth. John approaches his chosen quartet sympathetically but by no means uncritically. He proceeds warily but firmly through Carlyle'S writings, neither ignoring what needs to be rejected nor (the more serious temptation nowadays) underestimating the wisdom of his unfashionable discriminations . He is bold enough, given the current literary climate, to assert that Lawrence's 'pollyanalytics' are 'as intellectually suspect as Yeats's Vision,' and even his unusually positive response to The Plumed Serpent does not neglect the weaknesses of that novel. On the other hand John is careful not to prejudge the issues in the way that vitiated, for example, John Harrison's The Reactionaries. Supreme Fictions is, of course, a book about ideas and attitudes embodied in literature and runs all the risks that such an approach entails. At times John gets entangled in the detailed complexities of individual texts which threaten to blur the generally clean lines of his book - but then, has any Blake commentator avoided the fate of Laocoon? Sometimes (the treatment of Lady Chatterley's Lover is one example) his emphasis falls on the writer's intention rather than his achievement. But for the most part the interconnections are enlightening and convincing; Igot no sense that the writers were being forced into reductive categories. Pleasantly modest in tone, this is a well-written book that deserves to be read slowly and deliberately, one that restates what one already knows freshly and makes what one doesn't know seem clear. (w.J. KEITH) Rene Breugelmans, Jacques Perk. Twayne's World Authors Series 328. New York: Twayne Publishers 1974, 210, $8.50 (Can. $9.35) Jacques Perk was a Dutch poet who died in 1881 at the early age of twenty-two. Only a few of his poems were published during his lifetime but in the year after his death his friend Willem Kloos brought out a selection of his work, nominally with the assistance of the more established man of letters Carel Vosmaer. For this volume Kloos wrote a substantial introduction which was really a manifesto, for Kloos saw in Perk the precursor ofa new literary movement. The main thoughts of this introduction would again be insisted on in the periodical De Nieuwe Gids, which Kloos and others founded in 1885. Basically, the poets of the I eighties held that poetry must develop out of personal experience and 406 LETTERS IN CANADA observation, and that it must banish cliche and rhetoric. They turned themselves against the predominantly moral emphasis of Dutch nineteenth-century verse, the emphasis on - in Kloos's later words - 'piety, family and national history,' by insisting that nothing in poetry should be subordinated to the love of beauty. During the 'eighties, these writers moved towards a more and more individualist resthetic, expressed in its most extreme form by Kloos's famous phrase: 'Art is the most individual expression of the most individual emotion.' Perk's most important work is a cycle of sonnets inspired by a vacation in the Belgian Ardennes in 1879 and by his meeting there with Mathilde Thomas, who immediately became his Muse, his ferne Geliebte, his Beatrice. (She, by contrast, would later remember him as 'ennuyeux, blondasse, fadasse et collant.') The cycle in its earliest manuscript (which Garmt Stuiveling has called MS v) consists of a hundred poems, preceded by three introductory sonnets and followed by three more which constitute an epilogue. A second manuscript (MS K), read and annotated by Kloos in 1880, consists of 105 poems. Its pages were originally loose and no sequence can be determined from it. During the summer of 1880 Perk started work on a third ordering, but of this last version of the cycle only 65 sonnets were completed (MS p). It would appear that...