Visscher, Roemer

▪ Dutch poet

born , 1547, Amsterdam, Spanish Habsburg domain [now in The Netherlands]

died Feb. 19, 1620, Amsterdam

      poet and moralist of the early Dutch Renaissance who was at the centre of the cultural circle that included the young poets Pieter C. Hooft, Joost van den Vondel, and Gerbrand Bredero. A friend of Henric L. Spieghel and Dirck Coornhert, he was foremost in the movement for the purification and standardization of the Dutch language and the extension of its use in education.

      Like most versatile Renaissance men of letters, Visscher did not take himself seriously as a poet. He called his only poetry volume Brabbeling (“Jabbering”), and it was first published in 1612 without his knowledge. For the most part love poems, the work as a whole contains many allusions to Dutch social, political, and domestic life, presenting an authoritative picture of Visscher's Amsterdam. The style of the poems varies from fashionable wordplay to a simple, individual use of language that occasionally produces a poignancy rarely found in poetry of the time.

      Visscher's other main work, Sinnepoppen (1614; “Emblems”), is a collection of short moral pieces, again showing the writer's preference for essentially Dutch themes and objects.

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