Few People will have heard the name of Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert before he won this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. His work is little known beyond the confines of his native Czechoslovakia and the few scattered Czech émigré communities in Western Europe, Canada, USA and Australia. Moreover, Seifert's output consists almost entirely of lyric poetry—a genre of limited appeal in any language and one notoriously difficult to translate into a foreign tongue. The award will perhaps even come as a surprise to lovers of Czech poetry, as they could point to a number of poets of equal merit which this century has produced.

Seifert's advantage, however, has been to have outlasted all possible contenders to the title of greatest living Czech poet. In one of his most recent and important collections of verse The Plague Column he recalls how he recited his poetry at the gravesides of illustrious fellow poets Wolker, Halas and Hora and how he was destined to outlive them all:

        In the Julian Fields
        we'd sometimes lie at nightfall,
        when Brno was sinking into darkness,
        and on the backwater of the Svitava
        the frogs began their plaint.
 
        Once a young gipsy sat down beside us.
        Her blouse was half unbuttoned
        and she read our hands.
        To Halas she said: You won't live to be fifty.
 
        To Arthur Cernik: You'll live until just after that.
 
        I didn't want her to tell my fortune.
        I was afraid.
 
        She seized my hand
        and angrily exclaimed: You'll live a long time!
 
        It sounded like a threat.

Of the promising group of Czech poets of the '20s and '30s only Seifert now survives at the age of 83 as a living symbol of resistance to the ravages of time, war and politics.

He was born in Prague in 1901 in the working-class suburb of Žižkov, a milieu which was to provide him with much raw material for his earliest verse:

        I was christened on the edge of the Olšany
        in the plague chapel of Saint Roch …
        On the steps of the Olšany taverns
        I used to crouch at night to hear
        the coffin-bearers and grave diggers
        singing their rowdy songs.
 
        But that was long ago,
        the taverns have fallen silent
        the grave-diggers in the end
        buried each other.

His humble origins inspired his early political and literary affiliations. He was a member of the Communist party and one of the founding members of the Devětsil, a group of fervent young writers dedicated to the cause of working-class revolution. [Město v slzách (City in Tears)], his first collection of verse, described the down-trodden working-class districts of Prague and predicted a proletarian revolution.

However, Seifert's enthusiasm for revolution was short-lived. He soon veered in another direction, coming under the influence of Rimbaud and Apollinaire during a visit to France and joining the group of Poetists who exalted the senses and the subconscious above the intellect. As enthusiastically as he had initially embraced the cause of Revolution, he now began to extol the exotic and the sensuous.

Typical of this period of juvenile experimentation with its emphasis on sexual imagery was his playful poem the "Abacus" (1925) which relies heavily on the word "Australia" for exotic effect:

For a time in the 'twenties when Communism and youthful exuberance went hand in hand, Seifert managed to combine the twin themes of sensuality and revolution in his verse, but he was to be disillusioned by revolution following a visit to Moscow in 1925. He was distressed at the violence and bloodshed unleashed by the Russian Revolution and declared Russia to be the "graveyard of history". His final break with the Communist Party came in 1929 when, together with other prominent writers, he signed a manifesto criticising Clement Gottwald and his leadership of the Party.

From the '30s onward Seifert's poetry matured. His youthful, anarchistic excesses were abandoned in favour of less strident topics and a simpler, more direct style which became the hallmark of his best poetry. His themes became more universal—family, childhood, death, sorrow, and especially love, conveyed with moving lyricism frequently interspersed with warm sensuality. At the same time his evocation of the familiar and everyday was quintessentially Czech in its appeal, as was his verse which touched the patriotic feelings of his readers in descriptions and nostalgic recollections of the famous landmarks of Bohemia, the glories of Old Prague and the history and culture of a small and proud nation.

Seifert's sense of history caused him to respond in verse to the momentous events which affected his country during his lifetime. He expressed his people's grief at the death of their revered president and founder of the Czechoslovak state, Thomas Masaryk, in a moving series of poems entitled Eight Days. The pain of Munich and the wartime German occupation of his country were frequently invoked in his verse of the '40s. A series of important poems dedicated to the Czech writer Božena Němcova, which he wrote during the Nazi occupation, pictured her as a symbol of Czech cultural independence and resilience.

When the Communists came to power in 1948 Seifert was already in disfavour for his previous criticism of Clement Gottwald who now became President of Czechoslovakia. Seifert continued to maintain his distance from the new Party bosses and refused to conform to the prescribed style of "socialist realism". A further poem dedicated to Božena Němcova led to a vicious attack on him by the Communist poet and critic Ivan Skála who accused him of "sinking even deeper into subjectivism and apoliticism".

Little of his new poetry in this period was published by the state-controlled publishing houses—a significant exception being the charming and perennially popular collection Maminka (1954), an evocation of his mother, the charms of childhood, the family circle and familiar house hold objects. His prestige grew as this and his previously published works were being reissued, while his new verse circulated in clandestine copies.

The liberalisation in Czechoslovakia during the heady days of the "Prague Spring" which preceded the Soviet invasion of 1968 enabled new poems such as the collection Casting of Bells to be published, but this came to an abrupt end following his criticism in 1969 of the Soviet invasion when he was briefly president of the Czechoslovak Union of Writers and during the subsequent clamp-down on independent intellectuals and artists.

Despite his public protests against the Soviet invasion of 1968, his adherence to the dissident Charter 77 group and his support of dissident writers, there is nothing in Seifert's poetry that is so openly inimical to the present regime that it could not be published in Czechoslovakia. Even his most obviously political work The Plague Column—reminiscent of Camus' La Peste in its evocation of a pestilence affecting the political and spiritual life of the country—contains no direct reference to Communist rule.

His eschewal of clear-cut dissident statements in his poetry stems not from caution or weakness but from a belief in the essential incompatibility of politics and poetry. Like Pasternak, he maintains that the poet stands above politics and that only in this way can he retain the independence necessary to lay bare the tragedy of his time:

        He has the right to rape
        under the banner of beauty
        or that of pain.
        Or under the banner of both.
        Indeed it is his mission.
 
        Events themselves hand him
        a ready pen
        that with its tip he may indelibly tattoo
        his message.
        Not on the skin of the breast
        but straight into the muscle
        which throbs with blood.
        But rose and heart are not just love,
        nor a ship a voyage or adventure,
        nor a knife murder,
        nor an anchor fidelity unto death.
 
        These foolish symbols lie.
        Life has long outgrown them.
        Reality is totally different
        and a lot worse still.
 
        And so the poet drunk with life
        should spew out all bitterness,
        anger and despair,
        rather than let his song become a tinking bell
        on a sheep's neck.

Unlike many lesser writers who have remained in Czechoslovakia, Seifert has refused to allow his artistic integrity to be compromised. The award of the Nobel Prize is a recognition both of this and his poetic achievement. It is to be hoped that the Czechoslovak authorities will relax their harsh attitude towards him in his declining years and permit the publication of all his important verse in his native land.