SOURCE: "Between Dream and Reality: The Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert," in Scando-Slavica, Vol. 33, 1987, pp. 63-79.

In the following essay, Możejko examines the different stages of Seifert's career.

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, Vladimír Holan, Jiří Wolker, Stanislav Kostka Neumann and others. As noted by one critic [Květoslav Chvatík], no other generation has ever had a...