Page:May (Mácha, 1932).djvu/18

 The poet Macha stands as a unique figure on the threshold of modern Czech literature. Within a brief space of time, he succeeded in accomplishing a far reaching and valuable deed: the awakening of the Czech poetry and poetic imagination to new, higher spheres.

Up to his appearance in the literary arena, poetry in Bohemia was considered a convenient medium for the expression of moralist and didactic teachings. Macha was the first Czech poet to create new realms of lyrical vision. His work showed exquisite sensibility and an elaborate musical rendering of ideas.

If we seek a comparison of Macha's creative qualities with those of other poets, the work of John Keats naturally suggests itself as that of a spirit basically akin to the nature of Macha's poetry.

Not unlike Keats, Macha was of an eagerly sensuous disposition, and as the happy author of "Endymion" he could have asserted that "from Nature and her overflowing soul he had received so much that all his thoughts were steeped in feeling."

The force of Byron's influence upon Macha, by which it is sometimes attempted to solve the existence of romantic elements in Macha's literary output, can, if at ail, be explained as a question of coincidences of time, but does not bear a strictly psychological analysis. True, Macha was a great lover of the poems of the proud Lord of Newstead Abbey, but Byron exercised an influence upon him more by his exotic personality, than through the intellectual qualities of his works. And so the most romantic element of Macha's power of feeling, a certain morbidity of a constantly recurring conception of death, his outright nihilistic notions of life and his horror of the Unknown, differ fundamentally by their elegiac passiveness from the tempestuous and titanic pathos of Byron's pessimism.

Macha's "Diary for the Year 1835" is typical of his philosophical pessimism and desolate solipsism on one hand, and of violent outbursts of unbound sensuality and thirst of carnal love on the other. This would bring him much nearer to the theories and practices of the German