SOURCE: Možejko, Edward. “Between Dream and Reality: The Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert.” Scando-Slavica 33 (1987): 63-79.

A scholarly essay that provides a thorough, historically and politically grounded overview of Seifert's life and work while also providing nuanced readings of Seifert's poetry, with particular attention to Morový sloup.

1. the Early Period: from Proletarian Poetry to Poetism

Jaroslav Seifert made his literary debut in 1921, barely four years after the first publication of T. S. Eliot's The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock, and one year prior to the appearance of The Waste Land. Franz Kafka was still alive and living in Prague. In the same year, another Czech writer and Seifert's contemporary, Karel Čapek, wrote his play, R.U.R., which gave the world a then strange, but now familiar, term: “robot”.

The new generation of writers included such poets as Vitězslav Nezval, Konstantin Biebl, František Halas, Josef Hora...