On how not to be Lisbon if you want to be modern – Dutch reactions to the Lisbon earthquake

Abstract

Contemporary Dutch reactions to the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 mostly followed the general European pattern, explaining the event from a philosophical and theological stance. Still, the one Dutch poet to write extensively on the disaster gave a peculiarly Dutch twist to his interpretation. In essence, he used the Lisbon disaster to vent his views on the Dutch Republic's position at the middle of the eighteenth century, and to urge it to reclaim its rightful place in the scheme of things of what we in the meantime have come to call modernity. Some two centuries later, a major Dutch modernist poet again fastened upon the Lisbon earthquake to define himself in relation to that same modernity. However, he did so in a sense opposite to that of his eighteenth-century predecessor.