Beert Verstraete, “The Uniqueness of Willem de Mérode’s Homoerotic Poetry: A Classicist’s Perspective”
Thursday, 26 September 2013, 17:00-19:00 CET
Bibliotheek Universiteit van Amsterdam
Singel 425
1012 WP
Amsterdam
This lecture will direct you to what the speaker regards as the two most conspicuous qualities of Willem De Mérode’s (1887-1939) homoerotic poetry which make it unique in the long tradition of male homoerotic poetry—a tradition which in western literature goes back to Greco-Roman antiquity. De Mérode’s love poetry, like nearly all the male homoerotic poetry of the ancient Greek and Romans, is paederastic, that is, it speaks of love for adolescent boys and pre-adult young men. However, it reveals a quality of empathy with the real life-world of the beloved which is almost completely lacking in his classical predecessors. Also conspicuous is the Platonizing quality of his love poetry in which carnality is sublimated and eros is experienced as reflective and anticipatory of a higher love, namely the love of God, i.e. both the poet’s love of God and God’s love for him, and it is by virtue of this higher love, that the lover is able to feel united with his beloved without the stain of selfish lust clinging to him. In this transformation of eros, De Mérode’s intense Christian religiosity of the traditional gereformeerde variety in the Netherlands of the first half of the last century plays the decisive role. A comparison of De Mérode with other poets of the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century (e.g. Stefan George as well as the so-called Uranian poets of the English-speaking world) who speak of paederastic love confirms his uniqueness.
Beert Verstraete is Professor Emeritus of Classics at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada. At the age of fourteen he emigrated with his family from the Netherlands to Canada, where he received most of his secondary school and all of his university education, obtaining his PhD in Classics at the University of Toronto in 1972. In 1978 he went to teach at Acadia University and still lives in Nova Scotia near the University. The main areas of his scholarship are: the literary-critical study of classical Latin poetry; the Neo-Latin literature of the Renaissance (mainly as translator and commentator), including a focus on Erasmus; the construction of gender and sexuality in the ancient Greco-Roman world; and comparative literary studies, with a special emphasis on Dutch literature and the reception of classical culture in the literature of the western world. His publication most directly relevant to the subject of his lecture is a collection of papers he co-edited with his colleague at Acadia, Vernon Provencal: Same-Sex Desire and Love in Greco-Roman Antiquity and in the Classical Tradition of the West (2005); this includes a paper of his on the Roman poet Tibullus, to whom he’ll be referring in his lecture.