Aart van der Leeuw

[2] He attended the gymnasium in Delft, but he was a dreamer as a child who suffered in the harsh school environment where he was ridiculed.

He had little interest in his studies (except for Dutch and history), and on top of that he had health problems, with his eyes and ears, which would plague him throughout his life.

She is present in many of his early poems and was much interested in mysticism and spirituality; she is credited with shifting Van der Leeuw from skepticism to religiosity,[3] because of her non-dogmatic though Christian-inflected beliefs.

In March 1907 he resigned his position, on his doctor's advice, for health reasons, but this turned out to be a blessing in disguise: now he was free to pursue his calling.

[3] The novella Sint-Veit was his literary debut; published in 1908 in Albert Verwey's magazine De Beweging, it had been written years before, in Dordrecht.

Very much isolated in Voorburg and loath to mingle in the literary world, his friend Van Schendel helped him prepare a number of his books for publication, including Liederen en Balladen (1910), Kinderland (1913), and Herscheppingen (1916).

He traveled abroad only when his friends gifted him a trip to Italy for his 50th birthday, a trip he credited with prompting him to write Ik en mijn speelman, a typically neo-Romanticist book that thematizes the relationship between beauty and reality (influenced, Van der Leeuw said, by 17th-c spiritual writer and mystic Thomas Traherne) and chooses beauty over reality.