Poetry in exile

Josef Hrdlička's book opens up the question of what exile poetry is and whether it represents a similarly significant area as love or nature lyrics. It traces the complex and changing phenomenon of exile through examples of literary texts from antiquity to the present day, and against the background of the historical poetics of exile, it examines Czech poets who left their country after 1948 and made a significant contribution to literature written abroad. He uses poems by Ivan Blatný, Milada Součková, Ivan Diviš and Petr Kral to show the continuity and transformations of the Western tradition and the imagery of exile.