SOURCE: An introduction to The Plague Column, Terra Nova Editions, 1979, pp. ix-xix.

Parrott was an English diplomat and educator who specialized in Eastern European literature, music, and art. In the following essay, which he wrote on November 25, 1978 as the introduction to The Plague Column, he provides an overview of Seifert's career.

A régime which attempts to silence its country's greatest living poet sins against high heaven. In Vienna they may have thrown Mozart into a pauper's common grave, but at least they did not stop him from publishing his music. In Prague, at the age of 77, Jaroslav Seifert, today and for the last twenty years, indisputedly the greatest Czech poet of his age, has had to resort to samizdat to get his latest collection of poems published.

The Plauge Column was first circulated in this form in Czechoslovakia a few years ago. In 1977 it was published abroad...