Page:Modern Czech Poetry, 1920.djvu/16

XIV to him, in familiar things he often discovers an equally occult aspect. Briefly, the subject-mater of his five concentrated volumes is a search for the meaning of life. But the anguished questionings of his "Secret Distances" of 1895 represent an attitude entirely superseded by the passionate optimism of "The Hands", his final volume, in which he intones an enraptured hymn to human brotherhood for, like Sova, he has arrived at an affirmation of life, although by a difference route and through a different medium.

The remaining representatives of contemporary Czech poetry must here be dealt with by a process of selection, which aims only at discussing a few typical personalities. In the first place, no account of the matter would be complete without a reference to Petr Bezruč. This remarkable and somewhat mysterious figure is the author of a single volume which originally appeared in 1903 under the title "The Silesian Number", a revised and extended edition of which was re-issued in 1909 as "Silesian Songs"; Bezruč is a regional poet whose subject-matter is derived from the local conditions in the Teschen district, where the Czechs have, for years past, suffered socially and racially from the encroachments of the Germans and the Poles. In a variety of poetical forms, Bezruč intones variations on this single theme, and in his most characteristic passages he attains such a monumental utterance, such rhetorical and spontaneous vigour, that these verses have made their author's name a household word throughout the country.

While the impulse underlying the poems of Bezruč proceeds from the collective emotions of "Seventy Thousand", — the Silesian Czechs, — the verses of Karel Toman (b. 1874) are essentially individual in character. These fragile and elusive snatches of song are a direct expression of an equally fragile and elusive nature. They are pervaded by a bitter-sweet melancholy and a musical tearfulness which have suggested comparisons with Villon and Verlaine. In his later poems Toman has attained a firmer and maturer style, without sacrificing the delicacy of his previous work.

The poetry of Otakar Theer (1880—1917) is also intensely