De Parnas: 'dichtwekkend steil voor Neerlands besten' Poëtikale opfettingen yn it iere wurk fan Cynthia Lenige

Abstract

The eighteenth-century poetess Cynthia Lenige (1755-1780) has won a certain fame through a posthumously published collection of poems, entitled Mengeldichten (‘Miscellaneous poems’). In addition to this a manuscript containing poems of this poetess, ninety- three in total, almost exclusively in Dutch, has come down to us. According to the title of this manuscript Cynthia Lenige wrote these poems between the 14th and 17th year of her life. Investigation of poetological conceptions in these early poems shows that the youthful poetess explicitly participated in the contemporary debate on the use of mythological imagery and the application of linguistic and poetical rules. Both implicit suggestions and explicit statements in her poems make clear that she follows the great seventeenth-century poet Joost van den Vondel in opting for an idealistic kind of poetry: elevated language, mythological imagery and not too strict an application of rules. Although Lenige’s father, the Frisian poet Dirk Lenige, and the other members of the poetical society ‘Konst voedt ‘s menschen geluk’ in her home-town of Makkum had a practical and conceptual influence on her life as a poet, she herself took up this stimulating environment to give shape to her works. However, due to her premature death at the age of nearly twenty-five years only, Cynthia Lenige never fulfilled the high hopes that contemporary poets had had of her.