The Essential Gorter

  Following his epic debut masterpiece  May   in 1889, Herman Gorter continued to expand the boundaries of poetry. May is a dense and metaphysical, idea-filled  tour de force   by which Gorter tried to make eternal what was transient. In his  Verses  of 1890, he once more tried to record and unify his love for both nature and women. This time, however, he explored a much more sensitive and incidental approach. Every poem in  Verses  is an instance of feeling that expresses itself in words, that explores and exposes itself under the bright light of the unity he seeks. As Gorter let his feelings write his poems, he reshaped the rules of rhyme, rhythm, language and meaning in the process.  It makes Gorter's work after May quite impossible to translate. Take for example one of Gorter’s most crisp and engrossing odes to love. Its simple words powerfully express a vulnerable clumsiness we all can recognise. In English, quite literally, the poe...