A critical, commented edition of two monographs by Přemysl Blažíček on the poetry of Vladimír Holan and Karel Toman.Přemysl Blažíček introduced two exceptional dimensions into Czech thought about literature, alongside his distinctive judgments and clear linguistic style. The first is the perspective of philosophical interest, in which the art of the last century acquires a new, revitalizing meaning through philosophy. In this regard, the author was particularly guided by the texts of F. Nietzsche, H. Bergson, M. Heidegger, and M. Merleau-Ponty, as well as his contacts with J. Patočka, L. Hejdánek, J. Němec, and P. Kouba in the Czech context. The second contribution of Blažíček is a self-reflective view of the creative and operational mechanisms of academic literary science, which also signifies the chances of this discipline and a possible way out of the current dead end of increasingly unnecessary texts about art (inspired by the works of F. X. Šalda, J. Grossman, and E. Staiger). As a member of the Mukařovský generation of students, he maintained a critical distance from the methodological impulses of structuralism, and along with the individually distinct paths of J. Lopatka, J. Vohryzka, and R. Grebeníčková, his texts represent one of the few original values of Czech literary essayism of the last forty years...
