biography
| name: |
Perk, Jacques (Fabrice Herman)
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1859–81)
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| biography:
| Poet, born in Dordrecht, W Netherlands. He started to write casual poetry at a young age. During a holiday in the Belgian Ardennes, he briefly met the girl who would inspire him to write a series of sonnets, as Petrarch and Dante had done. This Mathilde-cyclus is the main part of his oeuvre, published after his death by Willem Kloos, who took the liberty to rewrite and ‘improve’ some of the sonnets. Kloos also wrote an introduction to the work which became the unofficial manifesto of the Movement of the Eighties (Beweging van Tachtig). Perk's work was an early example of the aesthetics of this Movement. It shows a love for nature, the glorification of beauty, and individualism. His platonic love for the girl Joanna Blancke, to whom he dedicated the few poems that were published in De spectator before he died, was the inspiration for his beautiful and famous poem Iris (1881). |
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