What’s to become of poetry? Everyone is versifying anything, everything is allowed and nothing is bad. High time for new standards and values.
The secret of the Murdered Maunder is a collection of Pfeijffer’s essays on poetry. It contains, among other things, his widely maligned essay ‘The myth of intelligibility’, the authoritative essay ‘The myth of the spontaneous girl’, razor-sharp pieces about Dutch celebrities (among whom Faverey, Nooteboom and Kopland) and historical essays on Sappho, Pindarus, Horatius, Goethe , Hölderlin, Lucebert and the invention of literature, all of this supplemented with a few pieces written especially for this book.
This book is a passionate search and a firm position. Here is a man who uncompromisingly declares his love to the greatest poetry and ruthlessly observes the productions of some monstrous sacrés as the fruit of false pretensions. This kaleidoscopic variegated book can be read as a coherent answer to the question as to what actually is good poetry. This book has changed Dutch poetry.