Mourning Alone and/or Together: Individuality and Collectivity in Dutch-Language Poetry of Mourning after 1968

In general terms, this project aims to study the ways in which Dutch-language “poetry of mourning” or “funerary poetry” models an experience of loss and grief after a person’s death. The starting point is 1968, a moment in recent history which symbolizes an increasingly critical attitude toward traditional values and rituals. In particular, the proposed project will analyze if, and how, post-1968 funerary poems stage their possible uses through the textual representation of an experience of mourning and if, and how, these representations create a tension between individuality and collectivity. The corpus comprises both collections of poems with a primarily autonomous function and cases with a primarily pragmatic function (therapeutic and religious poetry, thematic anthologies and poems resulting from “De eenzame uitvaart”).

With its focus on post-Romantic poetry of mourning, the proposed research inscribes itself in a rich international line of research and challenges some of its dominant approaches and views. On the one hand, by stressing poetry’s functions and uses, it counters the partial view on the development of post-Romantic poetry of mourning from a heteronomous to a merely autonomous practice. On the other, it aims at revising the current view on modern poetic representations of mourning as a merely individual experience. The heterogeneous corpus of the research will provide a much more nuanced picture than the traditional focus on highly canonized poems does.