SOURCE: A review of The Selected Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert, in The Southern Humanities Review, Vol. 22, No. 1, Winter, 1988, pp. 90-3.

In the following review, Werner offers a mixed assessment of The Selected Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert, questioning whether his work is worthy of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

[The Selected Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert] tries to answer two questions: who was Jaroslav Seifert and did he deserve the Noble Prize in Literature? When he won the award in 1984, Seifert was largely unknown outside of Czechoslovakia, but within his native country his poetry was immensely popular (if not always officially sanctioned) and he was considered (in [his editor and translator] George Gibian's words) the country's unofficial national poet. This volume goes far toward answering these two questions.

Jaroslav Seifert (1901–1986) was born into a working class background and wrote first a book of proletarian poetry. Soon, though, Seifert joined the...