Spoken in de dwaaltuin. Lucebert en de verleidingen van de intertekstualiteit.

Abstract

The complexity of Lucebert's work has generated a type of criticism which attempts to elucidate poetry through intertextuality. In this line of research it is generally assumed that the straightforward location of congruities between texts by Lucebert and external sources can guide the reading process and justify a particular interpretation. Consequently, Lucebert's poems are often fitted into an intertextual mould with great ingenuity. In doing so, however, the consistency of individual poems and collections of poems is ignored; the passionate quest for possible connections with texts that are unrelated to the poet's work trivializes the types of consistency to be found within his work.

Intertexts are not always suitable as frames of reference by which to interpret the work of poets such as Lucebert. Lucebert employed existing texts and traditions of ideas in an unsystematic and opportunistic manner and considered cohesion of both his poems and collections most important. As such, interpretations that fail to do justice to or even deny particular principles of form and organization have little to offer. In interpreting Lucebert's poems, it is above all relevant to recognize the poet's tendency to think in images. His work, therefore, does not in the first place appeal to the erudition of readers, but, rather, to their imaginative faculty.