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.
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Famous quotes containing the word youth:
“The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.”
—Policy statement, 1944, of the Youth League of the African National Congress. pt. 2, ch. 4, Fatima Meer, Higher than Hope (1988)
“Passing away, saith the World, passing away:
Chances, beauty and youth sapped day by day:
Thy life never continueth in one stay.
Is the eye waxen dim, is the dark hair changing to gray
That hath won neither laurel nor bay?”
—Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830–1894)
“Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you and me. Hark! in the next room his voice is sufficiently clear and emphatic. It seems he knows how to speak to his contemporaries. Bashful or bold then, he will know how to make us seniors very unnecessary.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)