Career
Between 1921 and 1958 he published fourteen volumes of poetry. Dubbed the poet of unfulfilled desire, he is hailed as one of the 100 greatest Netherlanders of the twentieth century. In his early years, Bloem was a great admirer of the symbolist poetry of Charles Baudelaire.
lieutenant is, however, for a relatively simple, almost naive poem that he is best remembered in the Netherlands, "Domweg Gelukkig in de Dapperstraat", "simply (or foolishly) happy in the Dapperstraat, a market street in East Amsterdam.
The poem also lent its title to a popular anthology of Dutch poetry. His legacy, beside his poetry, remains a bit controversial: he was suspected of antisemitism and of sympathizing, at least initially, with the German Nazi government, and in a recent biography the possibility of his having been homosexual was proposed.
A. M. J. C.