Hans Lodeizen

Hans Lodeizen , born Johannes August Frederik Lodeizen, was a Dutch poet. He was the author of one book of poems and a quantity of miscellaneous work. Despite his short life and modest output, his minimalist lyrics, which are generally constituted of short, unrhymed lines without capitals or punctuation, strongly influenced a post-war generation of Dutch poets, including Gerard Reve .
Born into an influential family, Lodeizen was raised in great privilege as the son of the director of Müller & Company, an international trading firm. He studied law briefly in Leiden, but took an interest in biology and pursued graduate study at Amherst College in the United States in 1947-1948. There he befriended the poet James Merrill who, after becoming "smitten" with Lodeizen, would describe him many years later as "clever, goodnatured, solitary, blond, / all to a disquieting degree." Lodeizen would lose interest in his graduate biology program and return to Europe to work for his father's firm; after his diagnosis with leukemia, he spent his last months sustained by blood transfusions in a Swiss sanatorium. He was 26 when he died.

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