Chants from the heart, loosely written to suggest that they express spontaneous impressions – this is how Jacobus Bellamy (1757-1786) wants his readers to consider his Gezangen (Songs), published in 1785, from which ‘To my Friends’ originates (Bellamy, 1785a, pp. 1-4). The title of each of his three main collections of poetry contains the word gezangen (songs). Bellamy conceives of his poems in the first place as songs, which, because of their ‘lightness and naturalness, immediately affect the imagination and the heart’, as the poet writes in the preface to his Patriotic Songs (Vaderlandsche Gezangen) of 1782-1783 (Bellamy, 1785b, pp. x-xi). However, Bellamy does not mention any tunes to which his songs can be performed. Also, his idea of ‘singing’ often seems to refer to his ideal of the poem as an inspired ‘song of the heart’ (van der Haven, 2016, pp. 766-767). Yet, each of these poems is not just a simple song but also a gezang, with the prefix ‘ge’ referring to both the act of singing and the content of what is sung. In Dutch the verbal noun gezang bears a stronger relationship with singing than lied, the more common term for song. It transforms the act of writing songs into a way of ‘singing’ that can be adopted by the reader, which means that the experience that underlies the origin of the song can be re-experienced by the reader through the (imagined) act of singing.

Taking his poems as songs, Bellamy underlines the social function of poetry, read by a congenial group of readers who enjoy the beauty of the poetry as shared songs of the heart. Friendship and poetry were closely linked phenomena in the Utrecht circle of poets to which the young Jacobus Bellamy belonged (Nijland, 1917, vol. 1, pp. 175-178). The genius-cult that flourished in the circles of friends around popular poets of the eighteenth century inspired Bellamy and his friends to establish their own club of ‘ingenious friends’. Their friendship was a form of reassuring each other's brilliance by praising friendship through the appraisal of each other's poetry (and vice versa) (Leemans & Johannes, 2013, pp. 538-539).