Seifert came from a poor background. His father, a failed businessman and later a labourer,
was a convinced socialist, his mother a devout Catholic. Due to his negligence in attending classes, he did not complete technical college. His first volume of poetry, Město v slzách
[City in Tears] was published in 1921. In 1949 he gave up journalism and devoted himself exclusively to literature.
Like many other members of the artistic-literary Devětsil association, he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1921, immediately after its founding. However, he was expelled in 1929 for his criticism of the Bolshevisation of the party and the Stalinist methods of its leadership. Throughout his life and his long literary career, he retained his empathy with the common people and, despite his expulsion from the Communist Party, he still espoused left-wing views. His poems were and are very popular, also because he wrote about love, women, home, and childhood.
As one of the leading members of the Devětsil artists' association, Jaroslav Seifert was involved in drafting manifestos, especially texts on Poetism, on which he, along with Karel Teige and Vítězslav Nezval, had a profound influence. The 1925 poetry anthology Na vlnách TSF [On the Waves of the TSF] was one of the seminal works of this new movement. In 1929, however, his critical political views resulted in his expulsion from the Devětsil group.
His criticism of Stalinist practices in political life following the Communist coup by Klement Gottwald in 1948 led to him being banned from making public appearances and publishing books. It was not until the partial liberalisation of social life and the rejection of the Stalinist personality cult in the second half of the 1950s that Jaroslav Seifert was able to return to the public sphere, although he did not stop criticising the political regime’s treatment of inconvenient authors, of which he was one. Later, he was equally vocal in his condemnation of the military invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. He became an informal moral authority, defending imprisoned and unpublished writers. After 1968, the official
publication of his works was banned, so they were published in samizdat writings, in exile, and in book form. During the period of "normalisation", he refused to silence his critical voice in exchange for permission to publish his works; on the contrary, in December 1976 he was one of the first signatories of Charter 77, a document criticising the government for its failure to uphold human rights. In 1979 his prose work Všecky krásy světa [All the Beauties of the World] was published, in which he wrote in his distinctive, slightly self-deprecating poetic language about his reminiscences and his encounters with friends. The poet, writer, and journalist Jaroslav Seifert is the only Czech winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1984).
THE MOON ON THEIR WINGS, 1926
b.1901 in Prague
d. 1986 in Prague
Moon on Wings
Hyacinth flower
the pope’s crown
the pope sleeps now
his beauty sleep
Behold my pipe
cloud of incense
hyacinth bud
suits me well
Night full of beauty
moon turned pale
the airplane
broke its wing
Death hangar of peace
Thrust from the sky
Thermometer mercury
gushed to the ground
Angel of mourning
over this wreck
of pinions of wings
weeps with yearning
You love of mine
sweet surf tide
the moon plays
the guitar shines
in: Early Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert. Translated by Dana Loewy, Evanston 1997, p. 163