Biography Essay

In modern Lithuanian poetry Henrikas Radauskas stands alone. His significance cannot be measured by his contribution to, or leadership of, any school or movement; nor can it be assessed in terms of his relationship to some general scheme in the development of Lithuanian literary history. He took no part in the activities of the early Lithuanian patriotic romanticism, or the futurism of the 1930s, or the romantic symbolism that followed, or even in the philosophical aestheticism of the postwar generation in Lithuania and abroad. He had no real predecessors, and any attempts to cultivate a following around him withered, not only for lack of talent but also because no one possessed his distinctive poetic vision.

That vision was of a world constructed by the poet for his own amusement and edification, not from things but from the semantic resonance of the names of things and of...