'Zoo gladt van styl, als ryk van zwier'. H.K. Poot in de ogen (en oren) van zijn tijdgenoten

Samenvatting

Naar aanleiding van: Riet Schenkeveld-van der Dussen, Dichter en boer. Hubert Korneliszoon Poot. Zijn leven, zijn gedichten. Tweede druk, Amsterdam, Bert Bakker, 2010. – 480 pp. ISBN 978 90 351 3341 9. € 34,95.

In her recently published anthology of poems by Hubert Korneliszoon Poot (1689-1733), Schenkeveld claims (as she has done at several earlier occasions) that Poot, as a poet, presented something new in Dutch literature, often making his own feelings and experiences the subject of his poems. Without questioning that claim, this article discusses the way Poot's contemporaries (reviewers, laudatory poets, his eighteenth-century biographer) responded to his work. Did they notice a personal tone that hadn't been known in Dutch poetry before? It is argued that there is no evidence at all that they did. Contemporary statements about Poot's poems can be fully described in terms of Horatian, mimetic-pragmatic poetics, 'personal expression' being no issue at all. Indeed, Poot is celebrated as a perfect representative of the great Dutch classical tradition, bringing new poems in the well-tried ways of Hooft and Vondel.