SOURCE: "Unpolitical but Not Innocuous," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4361, October 31, 1986, p. 1222.

Enright is an English poet, novelist, essayist, and editor. In the review of Selected Poetry below, he discusses political aspects of Seifert's poetry, briefly comparing his verse to that of Czeslaw Milosz.

Born in 1901, Jaroslav Seifert became something that, as [the editor and co-translator of Selected Poetry] George Gibian notes, we don't seem to have in the West: a national poet. But the price to pay for a national poet is high, calling for the kind of shared feeling born out of decades of war, invasion, occupation and suffering. In such countries political poetry is bound to figure prominently, through reflecting national experiences, aspirations and distresses. But so, also, is non-political or supra-political poetry—through mitigating party polarizations, reinforcing the sense that life is more abiding, larger and richer than the most decent of ideologies...