SOURCE: "Public and Private Poetry," in The Hudson Review, Vol. XL, No. 1, Spring, 1987, pp. 149-55.

Cotter is an American educator and critic. In the excerpt below, he offers a mixed assessment of The Selected Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert.

National poets are just about extinct as a species. Some literary conservationists may regret their passing; most readers will hardly notice. Their existence made the task of the selection committees for the Nobel Prize for Literature easier: find a country, then pick a poet. One of the last of their kind, Jaroslav Seifert of Czechoslovakia, received the award in 1984 in recognition of his contribution to Czech poetry. From his first book of proletarian verse, [Město v slzách (Town in Tears)], published in 1921, to his retrospective [Býti Básuíkem (To Be a Poet)] in 1983, Seifert gave voice to the popular notion of the private poet as a...