SUMMARY This thesis tries to find an answer to why most studies on the work of the poets that are central to our understanding of modern Dutch poetry discuss only a small part of their complete poetic works. It questions the assumption in the academic study of literature that a select number of works embodies the central themes and occupations of modern poetry most clearly. Those parts of these poets’ oeuvres in which they question or even move away from from what I call the ‘paradigm of modern poetry’ are ignored in most studies on their work. This study, however, argues that a focus on exactly those works that are being marked as making a transition or even departing from this paradigm is crucial to a more comprehensive understanding of modern poetry. The main questions in this study are how these poets change their views on their poethood and poetry, what made them change their way of writing, what made them put the modern paradigm aside, and what the way they have been studied up till now tells us about the conception of modern poetry in the study of literature. Central in this study are the works of Herman Gorter (1864-1927), Martinus Nijhoff (1894-1953), and Willem Jan Otten (1951). Departing from the case of the most paradigmatic modern poet, T.S. Eliot, this study puts forward a new model that charts the complete development of modern poets. Taking into account those parts of their oeuvres that are deemed ‘modern’ as well as, crucially, those writings that preceded and followed, I move away from conceptions that see these latter parts as ‘prologues’, on the one hand, and ‘discontinuities’ or even ‘betrayals’, on the other. In the case of Eliot it is often assumed, for example, that his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism was the end of his modernism. The model that I develop here, however, reassess these poets’ oeuvres and adopts a view of modern poethood as essentially dynamic, thereby seeing the different parts of these oeuvres as equally important phases. The introductory chapter of this study argues ...