Hothouses

About “Hothouses”

On May 31, 1889, a young Belgian lawyer from a wealthy bourgeois family in Ghent published a book of 33 poems in 155 copies. This was Maurice Maeterlinck's Serres chaudes (Hothouses), which marked the beginning of his literary career. Though his legal career was not successful, this collection later became recognized as a cornerstone of literary Modernism. The poems, presented with their English translations, include reproductions of seven woodcuts by Georges Minne and an early prose text by Maeterlinck describing a painting by Pieter Brueghel. The book was praised for its imaginative and inventive style, and it attracted attention from critics like Max Nordau and later figures such as Antonin Artaud. Despite Maeterlinck's fading fame, his work influenced twentieth-century writers like Beckett.