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.
Read more about this topic: J. Slauerhoff
Famous quotes containing the word youth:
“Sprung from the West,
He drank the valorous youth of a new world.
The strength of virgin forests braced his mind,
The hush of spacious prairies stilled his soul.
His words were oaks in acorns; and his thoughts
Were roots that firmly gript the granite truth.”
—Edwin Markham (1852–1940)
“Can delight
Chained in night
The virgins of youth and morning bear?”
—William Blake (1757–1827)
“Even though the world as a whole progresses, youth must always start again from the beginning, and as individuals go through the epochs of the world’s culture.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)