Poetry in Exile

In his book Josef Hrdlička opens the question of what exactly constitutes Exile Poetry, and indeed whether it amounts to a category as fundamental as Romantic or Bucolic lyricism. He covers the intricately complex and diverse topic of exile by exploring selected literary texts from antiquity to the present, giving due attention to writers that have influenced the exile discourse; from Ovid, Goethe and Baudelaire to the thinkers and poets of the 20th century like Adorno or Saint-John Perse. Against this backdrop of exile poetics, he turns his attention to Czech poets who left their homeland after the Communist Coup of 1948 and were notable contributors to Czech literature abroad. Hrdlička considers the works of Ivan Blatný, Milada Součková, Ivan Diviš and Petr Král, to show the continuity and changes in the western poetic tradition and expressions of exile.