Background
Pieter Cornelis Boutens was born on February 20, 1870, in Middelberg, Netherlands.
Domplein 29, 3512 JE Utrecht, Netherlands
Pieter Cornelis Boutens studied classics at the University of Utrecht.
educator translator writer poet
Pieter Cornelis Boutens was born on February 20, 1870, in Middelberg, Netherlands.
Pieter Cornelis Boutens studied classics at the University of Utrecht.
From 1891 to 1892, Boutens was an editor of the Algemeen Nederlandsch Studentenblad Minerva. Meanwhile, monetary worries forced him to take action. Admittedly, no further loans were granted, but the style of the great lord, which Bowens had already followed as a student, did not contribute to economic life. That is why in 1894 he took the position of teacher of classical languages at the Noorthey boarding school for boys in Voorschoten. At that time, it was a well-known institution, which included young people from aristocratic families, with whom Bowens could reasonably agree. However, for a young doctor, a classicist career did not stand on the horizon. In 1895, he contacted Lodewijk van Deyssel, which led to the publication of poetry in magazines and the first collection of poems in 1898 - and thereby adopted poetry as a way of life. In a sense, this choice was partially made by physical collapse, which forced the poet to abandon teaching in 1904.
Bautens's poetry flourished in the last days of the eighties: Lodewijk van Deussel stood at her cradle, and the echoes of Herman Horter’s magical witchcraft poetry can certainly be heard in the verses of 1898. Sometimes the somewhat artificial “word art” and the preference for neologisms of the eighties are also recognizable in the works of Bautens. But the impressionist art of describing this generation was alien to him, and soon he developed in a completely individual direction, which was strongly determined by his philosophical views: the teachings of Plato also gave meaning and content to his poetry. This was especially evident in the bundles that followed Praeludiën (1902): in Stemmen (1907), Forgotten Songs (1909) and Carmina (1912) almost as well as in sonnets (1920) and Summer Clouds (1922), his long inspiration was found to switch back to platonic and neoplatonic motifs.
After a vacation in Tirol, Bautens settled in the Hague, where he secured his life through private lessons and financial support from some aristocratic friends. Boutens also worked as a teacher in a preparatory school, then settled in the Hague as a tutor, poet. For the next several decades he wrote steadily, attracting an increasing number of readers who found his erudition impressive. Boutens was actually the author of Strofen van Andries de Hoghe, a book of homosexually themed poems supposedly written by Andries de Hoghe. Boutens wrote the introduction to the book and was its editor, but throughout his life he denied being its author.
In addition to writing his own poems, Boutens translated the works of others throughout his writing career. Authors he translated included Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Sappho, Plato, Goethe, Omar Khayyam, Novalis, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Boutens worked to raise funds for other artists and writers, and was very vocal about his belief that artists and poets should receive financial support for their work.
Although Bouten's early work emphasized the beauty of nature, his later works, such as Praeludien and Stemmen, were highly symbolic.
Pieter Cornelis Boutens was a member of the Association of Writers, and became its president in 1918. During the German occupation during World War II, he also was a member of the Nazi-installed Nederlandsche Kultuurkamer.
Boutens had an ear for melody, and he was a master of both the language and poetic form, who found just the right word to express every nuance perceived by his delicate senses. In his later work his poetry became increasingly cerebral, to the point where some readers viewed him as cold and unemotional. Sometimes his poems were so enigmatic and obscure that even in the original language, they were difficult to comprehend. Some authors, such as Ernst van Alpen in Dutch Crossing: A Journal of Low Countries Studies, have speculated that in some cases this obscurity is a deliberate attempt on the part of Boutens to express homosexual desire without explicitly acknowledging that he himself was homosexual. At the time, of course, homosexuality was considered morally reprehensible and taboo. Given this taboo, Boutens could hardly be expected to foreground himself explicitly as a homosexual.