This article is based on this Dutch article of Martinus Benders
Wings — the man’s instability is obvious from his publisher’s address.
But alright, first spend ten years pretending to be a Nijhoff clone with outdated sonnets, thought Breukers: let’s dominate this scene. As a student of Joosten, he knew exactly what cultural capital valued: the continuation of Our Lord’s dominion over poetry. And although — here’s where tragedy starts creeping in — Joosten never showed any appreciation for his wizard’s apprentice (because he didn’t fit the camp-script: too obscure and meant to be forgotten as quickly as possible), he did adopt his suggestions regarding the barbarian from Hellimond — the enemy of High-Lyric Poetry.
Over time, however, this began to chafe. Master Joosten seemed less and less of an authority. But here’s the crux: within this fertile layer of talent cultivation, reciprocity is an absolute necessity. I say you’re a great poet, then you say the same about me. But Benders never did that. He persistently rejected that fencing zone between Nijhoff and Komrij. And that earns you resentment. Reciprocity is the very soil literature grows from. Erase the offender. The dominance is under threat. We can’t afford this loose cannon.
Five years later, he hangs up his poetic hat.
So what lies between ‘I’m going to erase the great poet because he wasn’t reciprocal enough’ and ‘I’m actually not good at this either, let it go’?
That in-between, that twilight zone between resentment and insight — that’s what interests me.
What we see here is no simple case of resentment. Resentment is secondary. What’s primary is the threat of self-unmasking. The other — in this case Benders — refuses the symbolic transaction, breaks the implicit contract of mutual recognition. He says, through his work, essentially:
“I don’t need you to be great.”
For the narcissistically driven literary subject — shaped within a field where the I is constantly mirrored against the symbolic capital of others — this is unbearable. It does not merely deny him recognition, but more fundamentally: it denies him the mirror itself.
The reaction, then, reads as a defensive shift: from introspection to projection, from insecurity to elimination. The formula is:
“If you don’t recognize me, then you don’t exist.”
But between that score-settling and the eventual withdrawal from poetry lies the realm French psychoanalyst André Green once described as the negative: a zone of dissolution where the subject begins to negate itself without realizing it.
That is where the true tragedy resides.
The erasure of the other (the great poet who refused to play the game) turns out not to be a triumph, but to create a vacuum. The field is cleared, but what remains is silence. No adversary to define oneself against. No gaze to return. And suddenly — here’s the moment of reversal — it becomes clear what truly happened:
The other was erased because he was too real.
Too real in his autonomy, in his refusal to bend to the incestuous system of literary affirmation.
In Freudian terms: the death of the father figure (Benders as imaginary father) here does not lead to the takeover of his position, but to the collapse of the entire structure. The symbolic order, in which the subject gains recognition through others, crumbles.
And thus we arrive at the breakdown, the withdrawal, the farewell to poetry. Not as a conscious decision, but as a symptom:
There was no longer anything to prove oneself against.
This is the paradox of the literary field in its neurotic form: it can only function as long as everyone pretends the other is indispensable. The moment one subject withdraws from the game — the moment someone no longer engages in symbolic exchange — the whole structure collapses like a house of cards.
What lies between ‘erasing’ and ‘leaving’ is thus not a space, but an abyss. An abyss that reveals itself as silence, as disappearance, as the impossibility of existing without a mirror.
And then, once the house of cards had fallen, a new career had to be invented. The writer was born. That writers are not normally born this way — I know of no examples of talented writers whose careers began as failed poets — that’s where a second repression unfolds, even deeper than the first. The poet has vanished, but the need for recognition remains. Only: the medium in which recognition was originally sought (poetry) has now become tainted, burnt. And so a new field is sought where that desire can perhaps still be fulfilled.
Thus ‘the writer’ is born. Not from a drive toward language, not from inner necessity, but from the rubble of a collapsed mirror palace. This is not a literary birth, but a symptomatic restart. An If-then structure:
If I’m not a great poet, then maybe I’m an important writer.
The problem is that literary identity cannot be recycled. The energy that once fueled the poetic endeavor — however mimetic or artificial — does not vanish. It mutates, simmers, and seeps through in the style, the themes, the tone. Often in the form of a persistent, barely hidden hostility towards poetry.
Watch how such authors talk about poets:
“Cute, all that chirping.”
“Yeah, little poems. But I write novels.”
Or the more dangerous line:
“I started out as a poet, actually.”
As if that ‘starting out’ is a stage one ought to transcend as a mature literary being. Like a kind of puberty, a youthful folly.
But we know of no truly great writer who began as a failed poet. The talent for prose is never the shadow of a failed poetic gift. They are different forms of perception, sound, risk. Those who truly write prose do so because prose chooses them.
What takes place here is rather a symbolic self-replacement. The writer as cover figure. The mask meant to disguise the loss of the original ideal. And, in psychoanalytic terms: the harder the ‘new writer’ opposes poets, the more certain we can be that a wounded poet still lives inside.
So what do we see?
A process that starts with rejection (he wasn’t reciprocal), shifts into elimination (erasure), implodes into denial (I’m no longer a poet), and ultimately mutates into displacement (I’m a writer now).
A tragic metamorphosis in which one’s own failure is never truly acknowledged, but merely given a new outfit.
Luckily, at least, that outfit came with wings.