Hélène Swarth

Life

Stephanie Hélène Swarth was born on 25 October 1859 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Her father was Eduard Swarth, a merchant and banker who for a while was the consul for Portugal in Amsterdam, and her mother was Maria Jacoba Heijblom.

In 1865, Swarth moved to Brussels, where she was tutored by a French governess. Their unhappy marriage is the subject of a monograph by Jeroen Brouwers in 1986.

She died on 20 June 1941 in Velp, Netherlands. Conrad Busken Huet saw in her second Dutch collection, Blue Flowers ("Blue Flowers", 1884), a poetry receptive to nature and a female spirit which would make whichever man she chose as a lover very happy; a reviewer for De Gids saw worthwhile thoughts and images in only a few of the sonnets. Lodewijk van Deyssel likewise criticized the volume's songs and praised the sonnets—even to the point of prophesying that her name would be blessed.

By the time Sneeuwvlokken ("Snow flakes", 1888) was published, she had gained a reputation for a poetry of love and suffering. By this time she had moved to Mechelen. A review in De Gids compared her work favorably to "sweet, homely poetry", which he likened to a sweet little tune on a fiddle, whereas Swarth's "deep, full poetry" was like hearing Beethoven played by a full orchestra. Again, especially her sonnets were praised. An overview article in Vlaamsche School (1889) pointed at the influence of Pol de Mont, who had advised her to forgo reading narrative and epic, and instead focus on lyrical poetry, sonnets. The origin of the sadness in her poetry was located in a "loss of faith and bitter disappointments".

At least one critic gave her entire oeuvre (including the anthologized "Jeux Innocents" ) an autobiographical reading: Swarth supposedly gave her heart to a young poet but he was unfaithful to her. According to Jacob Ek Jzn, this particular cause of sorrow speaks in all her work, without becoming a distraction or a bore since she found many different ways and forms of expressing both the initial sentiment and its recollection. Swarth and her poetry figure in Ina Boudier-Bakker's best-known novel, De klop op de deur, as a female poet unafraid to express her suffering for love.

A key line from "Jeux Innocents" was cited in 1954 by then-foreign minister Johan Willem Beyen during a discussion on European unification: "Wij speelden pandje met ons leven" ("we bargained with our lives") was used to emphasize that all countries, even small ones, had much at stake in the era of globalization.