Boutens studied classical languages at Utrecht and established himself at The Hague as a private tutor and man of letters. His mysticism, or divine revelation, was achieved by linking the soul with the spirit of immortal beauty through complete introspection, or contemplation of the exclusively inner life. The immense spiritual solitude he came to experience is exquisitely expressed in the poem “Ik sloot de blinkevenstren van mijn ziel” (“I Closed the Shining Windows of My Soul”), from Verzen (1898).

Boutens' later volumes, from Stemmen (1907; “Voices”) to Lentemaan (1916; “Spring Moon”), symbolically treated the themes of solitude, pain, and death with a mastery of form and rhythm. His popular Beatrijs (1908), a narrative poem of childlike simplicity, tells of a nun who went to her lover “from May to May” but always returned to continue the life of the spirit. Boutens also was noted for his translations from Homer, Sophocles, J.W. von Goethe, and others.