"Dit innerlijk bedrijf, verzinnelijkt": T.T. Cloete en J.H. Leopold

Abstract

T.T. Cloete, who was an established literary scholar when he made his debut as a poet, is often described as “a poet’s poet” on account of his intense awareness of poetic form and the “co-existence” of content and form in his work. In 1959, twenty years before the publication of his first volume of poetry, Cloete wrote an academic essay, “J.H. Leopold on dreaming thought”, on the poetics, specifically the relation between content and form, of the Dutch poet J.H. Leopold (1865-1925). Although Cloete’s poetry is regarded as postmodernist and intertextually complex and although the two poets stand far apart in time and space, they share important poetical views. In this article Cloete’s analysis of Leopold’s poetry in the 1959 essay is used as point of departure to analyse and compare selected poems with the aim of discussing the similarities and resemblances between the poetics of the two poets