Het gevecht met de lezer: Jacques Perk en Percy Bysshe Shelley

Like Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose poetry proved an important source of inspiration, Jacques Perk was much preoccupied with the reception of his work and the complex, often antagonistic relationship between the author and his readers. His letters to Carel Vosmaer bear out how Perk had a particular type of reader in mind when writing his poems, including the famous lyric ‘Iris’. In the introductory matter, as well as in the poems themselves, he promoted reading strategies that, to some extent, foreshadow Wolfgang Iser’s ideas as developed in his Rezeptionsästhetik. The reactions to Perk’s work show the various ways in which contemporary and later readers defied his (implicit) reading instructions.