Herman Teirlinck - Education

Education

From 1886 until 1890 he went to the primary school Karel Buls in Brussels. He went to high school at the Koninklijk Athenaeum (E: royal athenaeum) in Brussels, where he studied Greek and Latin. One of his teachers was Hyppoliet Meert, a Flamingant and language purist. In 1879, at the request of his father, he started as a student at the Faculty of Science at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), but he himself wanted to become a writer, not a scientist. He succeeded in his first year of medicine, but he then left the ULB and went to the University of Ghent (RUG) to study Germanic philology; he didn’t do well here either and left RUG also without graduating. He wrote his first poems, Metter Sonnewende (1899) and Verzen (1900). In Ghent, he met Karel van de Woestijne, and they would become lifelong friends until the death of Karel van de Woestijne in 1929.