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This article is based on this German article of philosopher Martinus Benders: https://martijnbenders.substack.com/p/de-grote-rene-huigen-flop
The Great René Huigen Flop
https://neerlandistiek.nl/2025/02/rene-huigen-het-schilderij/
There are bad poems, and then there is Het schilderij by René Huigen—a text so desperate to be a masterpiece that it stumbles over its own pretentiousness and crashes to the ground, like a rhyming Icarus burdened with excess baggage. Let’s dissect this poetic trainwreck with surgical precision and see why it is not art, but a literary disaster in slow motion.
1. The Grand Desire… for a Good Metaphor
Huigen opens with an ambitious statement:
Desire grows like a shadow
Doubling in length as the sun
Goes down
Here, the first problem is already apparent: the metaphor is not only cliché, it is lazy. That a shadow lengthens at sunset is a scientific fact. No need for a poetic fanfare. And then comes the next disaster:
Yet it keeps burning fiercely,
While the feverish body shivers with cold
Aha! Huigen has discovered a paradox! Hot and cold at the same time! Anyone familiar with literary history will sense the presence of a great writer here—unfortunately, not Huigen himself, but François Haverschmidt, who, in Snikken en Grimlachjes, already satirized this exact “fiery freezing” paradox as the height of hackneyed romanticism. In short, Huigen starts with the kind of metaphor a third-year literature student should be ashamed of.
2. The Grand Market of Random Elements
What follows is a list that sounds as if Huigen hit his head against a painting and then randomly described what he saw:
In the raking light, the Grand Market, two riders,
A carriage rushing past in haste,
Greyhounds, a boy with a hoop
What is this? A hidden-object game? A 17th-century Where’s Waldo? And more importantly: why? Why this compiled inventory of things that might appear in a painting? It’s as if he thought the only way to capture the atmosphere of Berckheyde (a seventeenth-century anecdotal painter) was to cram every single element from his works into a list. This is not poetry; this is a Wikipedia entry divided into stanzas.
3. The Cursed Name-Dropping
Huigen is not just a loose cannon in his imagery, but also in his name-dropping. We get:
Berckheyde (no doubt for intellectual bonus points)
Jacobus van Zanten (yes, that one!)
John Milton (and then “The Lady” thrown in, just to make it seem like you really know your stuff)
Corydon and Alexis (for that classical touch)
The result? A text that pretends to be erudite but is, in reality, just as profound as a high school student tossing Aristotle into an essay to impress the teacher. Milton and “rhymeless meter”? As if the poem itself isn’t desperately trying to rhyme without rhyming. This is pseudo-intellectual nonsense masquerading as poetry.
4. The Grand Finale to Nowhere
Just when we think it can’t get any worse, Huigen goes for a dramatic sprint in the final lines:
The southern wind scorched
All my flowers. O Corydon … Alexis …
Is dying also coming home for those
Who knew they belonged to your flock?
Excuse me? Did Huigen read Virgil once and decide that he too needed to stage a death scene with a vague pastoral twist? This is such a forced, dramatic crescendo that you almost feel compelled to throw a chair. The emotion is not felt—it is imposed, as if Huigen is demanding that we acknowledge this as grand poetry.
Conclusion: The Painting of Nothing
René Huigen believes he has written a timeless masterpiece. What he has written is a dying swan of a poem, a collection of picturesque fragments, a naive attempt at intellectual gravity that drowns in self-importance.
The only proper rating for Het schilderij is a 2/10: one point because he at least managed to put words on paper, and one point because he didn’t literally include “the dying swan” in his poem. But it was close.
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