Jirí Wolker belonged to the generation traumatized by World War I but also dazzled by the creation of an independent Czechoslovak state in 1918. The young people of his generation sought a new vision of the world, a new faith, and a new means of expressing their belief in social revolution as the key to the solution of human problems. From the beginning of the 1920s Wolker's work incorporated features of the new literary style: naiveté, primitivism, and harmony among people and objects. Commonplace, everyday life and concrete, simple things became poetic. His death from tuberculosis and meningitis at the age of twenty-four also fixed his image in the public mind. Wolker himself saw his death as part of the all-important task of transforming himself in order to fit the dream of the revolution that he believed to be the only means of saving society and bringing...