SOURCE: "The Czech Nobel Laureate Jaroslav Seifert," in World Literature Today, Vol. 59, No. 2, Spring, 1985, pp. 173-75.

Harkins is an American educator and critic who specializes in Slavic Studies. In the essay below, he provides a brief overview of Seifert's career.

The award of the 1984 Nobel Prize in Literature to the aging Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert naturally raised many questions—hardly new ones. The Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy has demonstrated a striking preference for lyric poetry in recent years, a preference that the reading public scarcely shares. At least five prizewinners from the past eighteen years have been poets, not counting Seifert himself. The award to Pablo Neruda in 1971 reminds us parenthetically that this Chilean poet had taken his unusual (but somehow Spanish-sounding) pen name from Seifert's great countryman, Jan Neruda (1834–91), who, unfortunately, did not himself live quite long enough to qualify for the prize.

As a...