Van Ostaijen’s spiritual adventure is one of the great moments in the modern poetry of the Low Countries.

René Felix Lissen

Feasts Of Fear And Agony

by Paul Van Ostaijen

Translated from Dutch by Hidde Van Ameyden van Duym

With a contribution by Paul Van Ostaijen

Paul Van Ostaijen (1896-1928) was one of the leading figures of the modernist vanguard in Holland and Belgium, the restless, almost spasmodic quality of his work giving early shape and direction to the expressionist and dadaist tendencies in the Low Countries after the First World War. Feasts of Fear and Agony, a cycle of nineteen poems, was written in 1918-20, when he was with the Belgian occupation forces in Berlin. Van Ostaijen, himself active in leftwing revolutionary circles in Antwerp as well as the Flemish nationalist movement, was deeply affected by the turmoil in Germany. Indeed, the earliest sections of Feasts of Fear and Agony were written at the time of the Spartacist uprising and reflect his bitter, passionate response to the violence of the time. Other poems evidence Van Ostaijen’s preoccupation with religion and metaphysics and the interpenetration of the sacred and profane. After 1920, when Van Ostaijen had arranged the individual poems of Feasts of Fear and Agony into a cohesive whole, he copied them out by hand in an exercise of calligraphic experimentation. For commercial reasons, however, the work was never published in this form during his lifetime. In this its first rendering into English from the original Flemish, samples of Van Ostaijen’s calligraphy, reproduced in facsimile, accompany the opening lines of each poem.

Paperback(published Mar, 01 1976)

ISBN
9780811206013

Clothbound(published Mar, 01 1976)

ISBN
9780811206006
Portrait of Paul Van Ostaijen

Paul Van Ostaijen

Early 20th century Flemish writer

Van Ostaijen’s spiritual adventure is one of the great moments in the modern poetry of the Low Countries.

René Felix Lissen