Abstract
The chapters of this book freely link together an interest about the relationship between the language of poetry and the world. The word cosmos in the title refers to the idea of a structured world assumed, made visible, or shaped by the poem.
The first chapter provides several possibilities of how to understand the relation between speech and the world, noting distinctions of several types of poetry based on Lacan's Symbolic-Imaginary-Real triad. In Gaston Bachelard's poetics, which the second chapter addresses, cosmos is an essential prerequisite.
Similarly, another important feature in Bachelard's thinking is the separation of poetics and science. While this allows him to work with the image of the cosmos in poetry it also assigns cosmos to the realm of poetry, making science, in Bachelard's concept, no longer capable of imagining a coherent picture of the world.
The third chapter deals with images in Konstantin Biebl's poetry connected with places and movement between places. The fourth chapter is concerned with Roger Caillois' texts, which represent a distinct poetic meditation on stones.
Both of these chapters refer to Bachelard's conception of the cosmos, therefore further developing the second chapter to a certain extent. In the chapter dedicated to Paul Celan and Jiří Kolář I try to illustrate the disintegration of the previous conception of the cosmos following the Second World War.
A similar viewpoint can, however, be found in some Modern poetry, making it necessary to mention, at the very least, Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) and Yeat's poem The Second Coming (1919). Nevertheless, following the Second World War this perspective is no longer a question of several individual poems and, despite not becoming a dominant tendency, it can be said to form a significant and strong current.
In the chapter about The Notebooks of Josefína Rykrová (1981) I examine Milada Součková's last collection of poems and their attempt to construct a private cosmos based on culture and memory in conditions of exile during the Cold War. For me, Milada Součková's nostalgic and simultaneously constructive imagination can be seen as a counterpoint to post-war poetry.
In the last chapter I am concerned with poems thematizing the poet as the one who is capable of speaking in a poem, providing poetical speech with its efficiency and reactivity. Here the long and complex history of this "expressive figure" is only sketched and the focus is given rather to its decline in the post-war period.
This chapter also develops certain motifs from previous chapters, referring above all to the chapter about Celan and Kolář. As a supplement I have included two short studies on sub-motifs which are referred to in the book's main section.