Het primaat van de poezie. Een affirmatieve verwerking van de romantiek

In contemporary discussions on poetry, Romanticism still plays a vital role as the period in which literature emancipated from political, religious or rationalistic discourse. By labeling this process as ‘autonomy’, one can easily forget about the close relations with these domains, even in case of the ambitious Romantic poets who placed ‘Poetry’ on top of the cultural hierarchy. Discussing four recent Dutch studies on Romanticism, autonomy and literature, this article proposes an alternative approach called ‘the primacy of poetry’, which may serve to clarify the relation between poetry and other discourses on the one hand, on the other hand the relationship between the singular poem and the quest for the Absolute that Early Romantics called ‘Poetry’.