Perhaps hero isn't the right term for this Dutch polymath, but he certainly deserves recognition. Why Tyler van Whoorst is forgotten is a mystery. It may have to do with his highly principled carriage, which often brought him into conflict with his peers and cultural critics. Born in Amsterdam in the mid-19th century (he remembered his father reading accounts of the American Civil war), last heard of in a missive from Argentina congratulating NASA on the moonshot, van Whoorst lived in a time of unprecedented change. He himself was an agent of much of that change, producing small though influential works in the fields of architecture, fiction, poetry, music, painting, sculpture, chemistry, anatomy, evolutionary biology, theology, philosophy, historical criticism, paleontology, archaeology, horticulture, linguistics, entymology, electronics, forensic investigation, medicine, herbology, astrology and astronomy, ballistics, occultism, fashion, telegraphy, patent law, education, aviation, acoustics, environmentalism, social engineering, cryptography, campanology, metallurgy, brewing, comparative culturalism, cosmology, botany, navigation, aquaculture, psychology, economics, phrenology, cooking, transportation, and others.
We was a diplomat, an athlete, a musician, a painter, a journalist, a craftsman, a marksman, a poet, and a keen observer of life. A Renaissance Man. This page is dedicated to his memory.
Below is a fragment of a poem, though to be written in the late 1890's, though there is some
evidence to indicate he was moved to write it after the Petit London Comany's 1935 production of King Lear.
There is indication in his journals that this was indeed part of a longer treatment of the Song of Roland,
though no more of the work is known to survive.
More of his work will follow.