before he turned 30. On the heels of the 1948 coup d’etat he defected while in England on a government-funded cultural exchange trip. Shortly after denouncing the new Czech regime on BBC radio (and being severely attacked for it in Prague), he briefly entered a mental hospital in London. Later, he would say that he had suffered a “nervous breakdown” brought on by the stress of his situation. For the next several years Blatný worked occasionally as a writer, collaborating at times with the BBC and Radio Free Europe. In 1954 he was definitively institutionalized, although he moved facilities several times; the last few years of his life were spent in a nursing home in Essex, which is where he died in 1990. According to a statement bythe Czechoslovak ambassador in London, Blatný's Czech citizenship had been restored to him by the time of his death.

Blatný left behind thousands of manuscript pages. In 1969, after years of unproductivity, he had begun to write again in earnest, but most of what he wrote before 1977 is presumed lost; beginning that year at least a portion of his work was preserved, thanks in part to the efforts of an English nurse who had ties to Czechoslovakia. Some of Blatný's manuscripts were transported to people who managed to publish them—either in samizdat, which was punishable in Czechoslovakia, or abroad. The poems presented here are from Bixley Remedial School, a book published in samizdat in Prague in 1982 (an altered and expanded book of the same name was published