in 1987 in Toronto).

There is a stark difference between the poems Blatný became known for early on and the ones he would write after spending several years in England. The early poems are lyrical, often elegiac, and filled with details about the poet’s life. Blatný was a member of Group 42, a group of Czech poets and artists founded in 1942 around the tenets put forth by the theoretician Jindřich Chalupecký. The Group's foundational ethos was a kind of existential civilism; Chalupecký wrote that "the reality of the modern painter and poet is the city; its people, its pavements, lamp posts, store signs, houses, stairwells, flats."*

The city, and the poet’s material surroundings, are still present in Blatný’s later work, but the lyric mode becomes less prominent, giving waypoet suggests, can constitute resistance to the game, a resistance writ small. For an example he turns to Chinese poetry, which he says offers “very little … nothing more than the sky and a bird flying across it, / a bird flying across it; a bird, but a real one, one that has ceased to play the game, / one that will play no more…”**

Coercion, repression and censorship helped shape the destiny of the author of “The Game”—for the people who published his work, they were the salient facts of life. Maybe Blatný's poetry changed partly in response to the circumstances in which he lived, which could understandably have led to a poetics complex enough to resist cooptation. Maybe his work would have evolved similarly had he lived