SOURCE: A review of A Wreath of Sonnets, in World Literature Today, Vol. 62, No. 3, Summer, 1988, pp. 476-77.

In the following review of A Wreath of Sonnets and a French-language anthology of Seifert's verse, Banerjee offers praise for the poet's oeuvre.

Outside Czechoslovakia, the award of the 1984 Nobel Prize in Literature to Jaroslav Seifert (1901–86) was greeted with a yawn of indifference and a few winks hinting at the political inspiration behind the honor. Seifert was, after all, a lifelong Social Democrat from a victimized country, and he had gained world attention as the head of the Czech Union of Writers in the defiant months that followed the Russian invasion of 1968. However, to his people he was the much-loved, still-vibrant survivor of a magnificent generation of poets with roots in the 1920s. In this country journalists searching for a firmer footing for their comments soon found that apart from The...