Youth
Slauerhoff was born fifth in a family of six children and raised in a moderately orthodox-protestant middle class environment in Leeuwarden, Netherlands. He suffered from bouts of asthma, especially during his childhood years; to alleviate his condition, Slauerhoff stayed on the island of Vlieland a couple of times during the summer months with relatives of his mother's.
Slauerhoff attended HBS (secondary school) in Harlingen, where he first met future fellow writer Simon Vestdijk. In 1916, Slauerhoff moved to Amsterdam to study medicine. While at the university, he wrote his first poems, some of which were published in the Amsterdam student magazine Propria Cures. In 1919, Slauerhoff became engaged to a Dutch language student, Truus de Ruyter. He took little active part in conventional student life, preferring to take a more aloof and bohemian stance modelled on his French symbolist poet heroes Baudelaire, Verlaine, Corbière, and Rimbaud.
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