"The body ... what a target for the arrows of the most terrible mourning" Zahradníček's poem "Oh, Sebastian" as the intersection of its anthropopoetics and theophoetics
Abstract
The present study analyses the poem Ó Šebestiáne (Oh, Sebastian) by Jan Zahradníček, included in his collection Rouška Veroničina (Veronica's Veil) (1949). These poems areseen particularly as a way to represent the general approaches typical of Zahradníček'swork in the latter half of the 1940s.
In particular, the exposition is presented both from the anthropoetic and the theopoetic standpoint. This treatment of the poet's anthropoetics does not just indicate that artistic creation in general and poetry in particular have a biological-anthropological basis, affecting aesthetic and social ties, but that literature and poetry are something of quite fundamental significance to man, in certain circumstances of vital importance to his survival, affecting him in extraordinary ways.
This anthropoetical aspect is thematized both implicitly and explicitly in Zahradníček's poetry, as one of its driving forces and very prominently as a subject of poetic reflection. The initial anthropoetical and theopoetical framework of the exposition is also developed with an interpretationally-based poetological analysis of various poetic devices utilized in original ways by Jan Zahradníček.
This particularly requires an outline of the way he worked with free verse, which becomes a dominant feature in his poetry in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, as well as his rhythmic and semantic organization, an analysis of the strophic composition of his poetry and an analysis of his usage of such devices as punctuation and the like.