‘O demon van de poëziekritiek!’: Een onderzoek naar de verschuivingen in de receptie van de poëzie van Christine D’haen

Kila van der Starre reports on a study on the shifts in the critical reception of poetry by the Flemish poet Christine D’haen (1923-2009). The reception analysis is based on concepts from Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory and shows that D’haen’s poetry simultaneously played different roles within multiple repertoires. While in the early stages of D’haen’s authorship her poetry was approached with a traditional repertoire, in the final phases the reception of her poetry was dominated by a postmodern repertoire. Experimental poets such as Hugo Claus and traditional critics such as Raymond Herreman excluded D’haen from the experimental repertoire in the 1950’s. In the mid 1980’s there was a shift towards a postmodern view on her poetry, initiated by Paul Claes and Dirk de Geest. This move being re-enforced by the jury commentary accompanying the prestigious Dutch Literature Prize which D’haen received in 1992 and the inclusion of her poetry in the postmodern Plejade-anthology. After her death D’haen was compared to the same experimental poets with whom she previously had been seen as an opposing symbol. An analysis of the mention ‘Hugo Claus’ presents a perspective on this ambiguous relationship with experimental poetics. The shift from traditional to postmodern, however, is not straightforward. Critics used a combination of elements from different repertoires to discuss D’haen’s poetry. The often contradictory terms, among which ‘traditional’ and ‘untraditional’, ‘classical’ and ‘anti-classical’, ‘archaic’ and ‘modern’, ‘old-fashioned’ and ‘innovatory’, ‘classicist’ and ‘postmodernist’, is an indication of the complexity of the shifts that took place in the reception of D’haen’s work.