Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/697

 Viktor Dyk, with his epigrammatically pointed comments and broadsides, his lyrically felt and national-minded marginal notes to current politics, his laconic yet deeply romantic emotionalism. Rudolf Medek has secured a reputation as a crier in the battle, as a poet of soldier songs, and now of love songs. The paradoxically tragic situation of the people in the midst of the world war has been expressed most strikingly by the richly tuned writer of elegies, Karel Toman, and the author of simple nature lyrics, Petr Kricka; while Frana Sramek, who was also touched on in the paragraphs on the theatre, has, by his delicately perfumed impressionistic variations on the themes of love and youth, secured for himself an all too unstinting adherence and discipleship among the present generation of lyrists.

In the lyric too there is seething and ferment. Here also strenuous trials and experiments are being made; the search prevails for a new form to fit a new life content, or for some way of adapting the traditional rigid song form, with its musical inspiration and its strophic arrangement, to the powerful content which is continually rising about us, but which comes even more persistently from the depths of the inner life, crying for expression and bidding fair to enrich not only the national culture, but the culture of Europe as well. Author:Otokar Fischer