Mei

…first and most important poem, “Mei” (“May”). In describing with Impressionist imagery the beauty of the Dutch spring landscape on the arrival of the personified May, her joy and subsequent disillusion, Gorter symbolized his own spiritual development: from orgiastic abandonment in nature to a quieter, metaphysical longing for peace within…

…by Herman Gorter’s poem “Mei” (1889), the masterpiece of the movement, Kloos evolved the dictum that poetry should be “the most individual expression of the most individual emotion.” This aspect of the 1880 movement eventually proved the spiritual downfall of Kloos, for, unlike his fellow poets Gorter and Albert…