Georges Rodenbach

Georges Raymond Constantin Rodenbach (16 July 1855 – 25 December 1898) was a Belgian Symbolist poet and novelist.

Georges Rodenbach was born in Tournai to a French mother and a German father from the Rhineland (Andernach).

He produced some Parisian and purely imitative work; but a major part of his production is the outcome of a passionate idealisation of the quiet Flemish towns in which he had passed his childhood and early youth.

In his best known work, Bruges-la-Morte (1892), he explains that his aim is to evoke the town as a living being, associated with the moods of the spirit, counselling, dissuading from and prompting action.

Albrecht Rodenbach, his cousin, was a poet and novelist as well, and a leader in the revival of Flemish literature of the 19th century.

Rodenbach's tomb in Paris.