Ivo Pospíšil

Abstract: The author of the present article demonstrates three currents in the theory of verse which occur in the field of Czech/Brno versology of the 1960s, in the works of the Serbian linguist and specialist in style research Milosav Čarkić, and the prematurely deceased Czech theorist of literature Pavel Jiráček. The two conferences held at the Faculty of Arts in Brno in the1960s represent the traditional theory of verse linked to immanent methods with remnants of classical positivist history, but mainly formalist and structuralist, aiming at the exactization of the verse theory with quantitative methods. Čarkić is a representative of the specific stream based on lexical-stylistic and semantic analysis of the verse in the comparative context continuing the conceptions of Andrey Bely and Kirill Taranovsky. The third research realised by Pavel Jiráček demonstrates the significance of rhythmical-somatic-semantic and phonic conception at the background of psycho-philosophical notion of the verse penetrating the real core of human psychic structures in which the whole creative and perceptive aspects of verse arise.

Key Words: Three currents in the theory of verse, the two Brno versological conferences of the 1960s, immanent and exact quantitative methods, structuralism, lexical-stylistic-semantic analysis of verse, rhythmical-somatic-semantic and phonic basis of verse.

The present contribution covers selected chapters from the history of the verse theory, prevalently Czech (so it has rather a historical than a theoretical character), and analyzing some of the traditions of the theory of verse in the second half of the 20th century and in the first third of the 21st century with a special regard to the works of Roman Jakobson, Josef Hrabák, the two versology conferences held in Brno in the 1960s, the verse studies by Serbian theorist Milosav Čarkić with the core in his recent book A Dictionary of Rhyme Terms (2020) and the ideas which Pavel Jiráček, who prematurely died in 2020, expressed in his four books, especially in his last one From the Words to the Lyric Consciousness (2020). The three parts of the present treatise represent the three fields of contemporary verse theory: the first connected with the traditions of the Prague Linguistic Circle, the second (Milosav Čarkić) based on the comparative and terminological approach, and the last one more or less with the phonic and psychological aspects of verse in general and the specific example of the modern poetry in particular.

The traditions of the verse history and theory in former Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic go back to the 19th century, but mainly develop in the first half of the 20th century in the traditional phonic, normative framework linked to the positivist methodology on the one hand, and to the structuralist verse theory connected with the methodology of the Prague Linguistic Circle on the other; in the last 10 years there have appeared the quantitative and computer approaches resulting in the formation of the Corpus of the Czech Verse.¹

The modern 20th-century Czech theory of verse is closely linked to the early work by Roman Jakobson (1896–1982), who came to Prague in 1920 as an interpreter of the Russian Red Cross to repatriate the former Russian soldiers; at that time he was an adherent of the Russian October Revolution and the formalist approach to arts expressed by the OPOJAZ and the less radical Moscow Circle. When Jakobson got acquainted with the generation of the young Czech modernist and avant-garde poetry in the framework of Czech poetism (a specific literary current, a Czech variety of dadaism) and personally with its representatives, such as Jaroslav Seifert, a future Nobel Prize winner, Vítězslav Nezval and others, he wrote a treatise called On the Czech Verse: Compared Above all with the Russian One², later he wrote his essay on the Old Czech Hymns (The Oldest Czech Spiritual Hymns³).

After his example a young Czech verse theorist Josef Hrabák (1912–1987) created two books published towards the end of the 1930s and at the beginning of the 1940s.⁴ Later he produced tens of books, edited many works of Czech literature, dealt with contemporary prose writings, comparative and genre studies, literary currents, textology, medieval studies etc.⁵ In his book on the comparison of the Polish and Czech verse he depicts the impact of the Czech 14th century verse upon the Polish poetry of that time, for example, the verse of the songs such as Skargy umierającego, O ciało boga żywego, Zdrowaś, gwiazdo morska, Radości wam poviedam, Jezus Chrystus, bog-człowiek, and also Alfabet Parkosza; at that time the substance of the Czech verse stood closer to the Polish than later. Hrabák used the quantitative formalist approach based on the theory of Russian formalists (Yu. Tynyanov, B. Eichenbaum, R. Jakobson, V. Zhirmunsky); he quotes Jakobson’s essay on Czech and Russian verse and he studies some Polish works on the Polish verse during his study stay in Poland, mainly in Cracow, and cites several Polish works, sometimes going back to the beginning of the 19th century.⁶ In the 1960s there started the boom of the theory of verse, in Central European countries in connection with the return and revival of formalist and structuralist methods, in former Czechoslovakia continuing the traditions of Czech structuralism in the so-called Prague school (Prague Linguistic Circle). His second early book concerned the so-called Smil School, a group of Czech medieval poets going back to the 14th century which stood on the top of European poetry of that time.⁷

Hrabák as a young member of the Prague Linguistic Circle analyses from the structuralist standpoint the key works of the medieval poetry written in Czech, including the characteristics of the Smil Flaška of Pardubice school in connection with the retreat of verse in Czech literature, its formal features and the Smil ideology. The second chapter of his book deals with the poetic compositions, such as the Czech Alexandreis, The Chronicle of the so-called Dalimil, the work of the Hradec Manuscript, A Legend of St. Catherine, Father’s Advice to His Son, The Roudnice Martyrdom, on the verse and the structure of the sentence, the number of syllables in the verse, the distribution of words and the rhyme pairs and the sound instrumentation, then verse technique etc. also in the poem by Smil of Pardubice The New Council (1394–1395).

The tendency towards the structural analysis of the verse with the application of new quantitative methods also using the computer approaches appeared as a leading tendency at the two conferences held in Brno in the 1960s which gradually became a specific centre of Czechoslovak verse studies. The mentioned conferences realized at the Brno University, earlier and later called Masaryk University (at the time the two conferences were held it bore the name of the Czech natural scientist Jan Evangelista Purkyně, 1787–1869)⁸, welcomed literary scholars from several countries.⁹

The Brno conferences held towards the end of the 1960s under the name of Theory of Verse (Teorie verše) accentuated their global, complex character in the period of the increasing interest in immanent, quantitative methods connected in the Czechoslovakia of that time with the name of Jiří Levý, an expert in English and Czech studies, theorist of verse and translation (translatology) as well as of the methods of literary criticism. The conferences declared the immense interest of literary scholars, linguists, literary historians, specialists in poetology etc. While this tradition continued in the world, in the Czech cultural environment it was gradually disappearing.

The mentioned tradition of the formalist/structuralist approach in verse theory in the Czech literary environment goes back to the 19th-century and the beginning of the 20th centuries. The Brno Slavonic philology formed an appropriate base for the Prague Linguistic Circle connecting Prague, Brno, Bratislava, and Vienna in the interwar period in the field of linguistics and literary scholarship (among others Nikolaj Durnovo, Bohuslav Havránek, Frank Wollman, František Trávníček; Roman Jakobson had worked at Masaryk University since 1933¹⁰).

As stated above, at the beginning of this tendency in verse theory in Brno there were two analyses by Josef Hrabák Old Polish Verse Compared with the Old Czech Verse / Staropolský verš ve srovnání se staročeským (Pražský lingvistický kroužek, 1937) and The Smil School: Analysis of Poetic Structure / Smilova škola: rozbor básnické struktury (1941, Jednota českých matematiků a fysiků, Studie pražského lingvistického kroužku). The interest in the phenomenon of the verse did not disappear from Masaryk University even later, which can be confirmed by Otakar Levý, a specialist in Romance philology, father of Jiří Levý, one of the representative figures of the above mentioned Brno conferences, verse and translation theorist; Otakar Levý produced a monograph on Baudelaire (Baudelaire, His Aesthetics and Technique)¹¹. Karel Štěpaník, a representative figure of the Brno English literary studies, continued the analysis of poetry from the comparative aspect (The Poetic Work of John Keats)¹². Especially these works represent a gradual retreat from the purely formally grasped verse theory towards a wider understanding of the verse, e. g. the inclusion of the verse theory in the complex of theory and history of literature.

On this basis it is possible to sum up that the Czech theory of verse developed in conjunction with the mutual relations of the theory of verse to history and theory of literature as well as to poetics and poetology, theory of translation or translatology.

The period of the 1960s in Czech humanities constructed the intentional continuity with German and Czech formism and Russian formalism and structuralism of the Prague Lingustic Circle later enriched by French structuralist poetology and the so-called Lotman Tartu School linked to structuralist and semiotic analyses promoted in Europe by Karl Eimmermacher in his edition of the work of Yuri Lotman structuralist school.¹³

Stronger bonds of the development of the Czech verse theory than it could have been expected were linked not with the modern exact literary criticism, but with the metamorphosis of practical politics. It is not surprising that the Brno conferences were held not earlier than after 1963, in Czechoslovakia the time of a big political turn leading afterwards to 1968. The turn, the significance and the epochal importance of which could only be recognized by the following generations deep in the 21 century, led to a great boom of autonomous, joyful, liberated, and constructive thinking. That time is not by chance associated with the flourishing of modern poetry which was analysed by himself a poet and follower of neostructuralist verse theory Miroslav Červenka (1932–2005).¹⁴

The first international Brno conference was held on 13–16 May 1964. The conference volume was published in 1966.¹⁵ In the foreword formulated by Josef Hrabák there is the whole programme for further research and the division of the conference into several thematic entities: 1. verse and language; 2. the problems of comparative versification, 3. verse and meaning, 4. the Czech and Slovak historical poetics; 5. application of mathematical methods.¹⁶ Already at this time the two conceptions proclaimed by Josef Hrabák and Jiří Levý arose. Hrabák, who stated his creative purpose by his two already mentioned books from the interwar period, one published by the Prague Linguistic Circle, tended towards a wider entity of literary history (René Wellek – theory of literary history) and the sphere of mutual relations of various disciplines of literary criticism; Jiří Levý was more oriented on the specific problems and new methods in the theory of verse, to more exact approaches and the technology of the verse, to mathematical and statistical attitudes in the verse theory as well as in literary criticism as such. Quite interesting was not only the thematic range of the conference, but rather its multidisciplinarity: linguists, literary historians, theorists of the verse, translation, folklore studies, Czechs, Germans from both German states of that time, Poles, Romanians, though not everybody took part in the publication of the conference volume.

The section called “Verse and Language” opens up with the study by Josef Hrabák “The Retrogressive Theory of Verse” written in English (pp. 9–21) as it has a key importance. The author accentuates the methodological problems which were underrated. The theory of verse is inevitably constructed in a retrogressive way, i. e. from the perspective of today back to the past, not vice versa. The basis of the specific features of the verse is regarded as a special segmentation: the normative number of syllables, metrical feet or stresses, this all represents the features connected with the segmentation of the verse, not with its substance. Among the contributions in the volume there are Viktor Kochol’s Syllabism and Tonism analyzing the Russian transformation of the Czech and Slovak syllabo-tonic or syllabic verse into the Russian tonism, linguist Milan Jelínek demonstrates the word order in Czech poetry (V. Nezval, J. Hora, F. Halas, M. Florian, Milan Kundera, Ivo Fleischmann, Josef Kainar, Jarmila Glazarová, Karel Šiktanc, Jan Skácel, Oldřich Mikulášek) connecting his research to the functional perspective conception of the Brno anglicist Jan Firbas; Jelínek selects poetic examples from various generations stressing the Moravian origin of several poets, applying in this way Hrabák’s retrogressive approach to the verse theory.

The specialist in syntax Miroslav Grepl writes about the phrasing of the verse. Much later Grepl was one of the reviewers of the key monograph on metaphor by Jiří Pavelka¹⁷. The expert in Romance studies and phonetics and phonology Karel Ohnesorg (teacher of Jaroslava Pačesová whose studies in children’ verse and speech were highly praised by Roman Jakobson, who later also dealt with this subject) analyzes the specific features of the children’s verse in the contribution in French Le Vers enfantin.

In the section “The Problems of the Comparative Versification” Maria Dłuska (Cracow/Kraków, 1900–1992) analyzes the system of stanzas, Miroslav Beck writes about the relation of the rhythm of the verse and the phonology of the sentence in his contribution written in German “Remarks on the Comparative Metrics / Bemerkungen zur vergleichenden Metrik”, Josef Kvapil, expert in Romance studies, demonstrates the versification in Romance languages (“On the Margin of the System of Versification in Romance Languages”), Alexander Pozdneev from Moscow analyzed the Russian verse from the 15th up to the 18th centuries which is remarkable especially in relation to the fact that there are only few verses in medieval Russian literature. The translator and specialist in stylistics Bohuslav Ilek investigates the rhyme in Russian 20th- century avant-garde poetry, Jaroslav Burian analyzed the quotations of folklore genres in modern poetry and their Czech translations.

The kernel section of the conference volume is “The Verse and the Meaning” opening with Jiří Levý’s investigation “Preliminaries to an Analysis of the Semantic Functions of Verse” (in English). His study according to the declaration of the author himself is oriented on the specification of the reflections on the verse and its meaning, based on the division of phonic (acoustic) elements, i. e. on their symbolic activities, on the degrees of the sign and signal character, but it also contains the genesis, motivation, index, symbolic, and iconic character of the verse sign. The contributions of the articles written by Viliam Turčány, Jan Brezina and the above mentioned Miroslav Červenka take into account the practical from the point of view of poetic realism and translation, historian of literature Hana Jechová (later Voisine-Jechová, professor of Czech literature at Paris Sorbonne) analyzes the verse structure and the method of the reflection of reality on the material of Czech poets Jan Neruda, Jaroslav Seifert and František Halas; Libor Štukavec, for many years a director of the Central Library of the Faculty of Arts in Brno, anglicist and nordist, investigates the syntax of the free verse mainly in the poems by Jan Skácel.

The section from the Czech and Slovak historical poetics brings the treatise by Karel Horálek studying the mutual relations between the verse systems in folklore and articles by Zdeňka Tichá (the medieval Czech non-metre verse), František Svejkovský (the non-metre verse of the Hussite times), Bohuslav Beneš (Czech street ballads) and Artur Závodský (three types of prosody in F. L. Čelakovský’ poetic work). As if on the margin, there is a section called “On the Application of Mathematical Methods” which later became the central part of the second volume (Jana Klimentová, Robert Štukovský, Gabriel Altmann, Josef Hrabák).

The second volume Theory of Verse II / Teorie verše II¹⁸ contains the contributions of the conference held on 18–20 October 1966. The modified situation in the topical politics was reflected in the big number of papers from abroad and in the relative freedom of thought and in the selection of subjects – the section “The Mathematical Analysis of the Verse / Matematický rozbor verše” occupied the second position due to the thematic importance. Though there are also traditional sections, such as “The Semantics of the Verse / Sémantika verše” (Karel Hausenblas, Svetozar Petrović, Zagreb, Josef Hrabák, Brno, Pavel Trost Praha, and Mária Ivanová-Šalingová, Bratislava), the dominant position is occupied by the mathematical analysis of the verse in the studies by Helmut Lüdtke (Freiburg im Breisgau), Miroslav Červenka and Květa Sgallová (the probability model of the Czech verse) and others including Jiří Levý. Less substantial is comparative metrics with the interesting comparison of the Georgian and English verse by Givi Gačečiladze. In the section on the Czech and Slovak verse theory there are the studies in the syntactic coherence in the new Czech poetry; even more important studies deal with the older periods of Czech literature by Zdeňka Tichá and František Svejkovský, Květa Sgallová investigates the rhyme, and Hana Jechová the verse and the sentence in the poetry of the May Group of Czech poets of the mid-19th century, Zora Válková (Bratislava) analyzes the rhytmical structures in the poetry of Slovak „concretists“, Viktor Kochol (Bratislava) the syntax and the metre etc.

Despite the tendency towards the exactness of the theory of verse and the shift from the classical to modern poetry, the traditional sections do not disappear, besides the strengthening position of the „moravica“, i. e. the material of the specific features of Moravian poetry accentuating the regional character of the verse and its components.

Another current of the verse theory and history is represented by the work of the Serbian linguist and theorist of verse Milosav Ž. Čarkić (1948–2022), the author of several books and an enormous number of studies and articles.¹⁹ His main field of interest is the research of the poetic language of Serbian poetry and the poetic code of poetry in general. He is the founder of the international journal STIL which unfortunately ceased to exist. His creative and inventive research and attempts at (at least) partial syntheses including the phonetic-phonological structure of poetry as such rank among the best verse studies and theories as well as the most significant examples of the analysis of the style in the world. This highly respected university professor who gave lectures in Moscow, Banja Luka, Niš, Tuzla, Opole, Brno and other universities, who participated in significant international conferences and symposiums, a brilliant theorist of verse, and the author of extensive books, among others, Фоника стиха (1992), Фоностилистика стиха (1995), Појмовник риме (2001), Стилистика стиха (2006), On Poetic Language (2010), Models of Rhyme (2017), Рима у српском стиху, Међународно удружење „Стил“, Београд (2017), now produced a brand-new book of key international significance.

Стих и jезик (Београд 2013)²⁰ is even more compact than some of his books going back to the 1990s dealing with crucial problems of the state, status and development of poetic language. I can just repeat the words used in one of my reviews of Čarkić‘s preceding book that there are only a few specialists who so systematically as Čarkić analyze the problems linked to the linguistic aspect of verse theory.

The poetic text cannot be properly understood without taking into account the significance of its linguistic layer (e. g. the phenomenological stratification of the literary work by R. Ingarden, i. e. the layer of sounds and sound patterns and characters of a higher order; the layer of semantic units: the meaning of individual sentences and the meaning of whole sentence structures; the layer of schematized aspects through which various objects described in the literary work are manifested; the layer of the objects described, which manifest themselves in the international circumstances created through sentences).

The author stresses the generally accepted fact that the literary work has been realized in language and existed only through language being filled with the poet’s personal poetic content. The language of the poetic work contains both the conventional, generally understood meanings and the new or newly created innovated poetic meanings. When the author tried to define the specificity of the verse itself he speaks about a strictly organized language segment, a condensed poetic discourse with a specific graphic, as well as specific rhythmic and sound organization. Though he deals with this aspect later on, nevertheless I would prefer to define the verse, as the Czech theorist of verse Josef Hrabák put it, as an entity sui generis which can be identified neither with the word or a word group nor with the sentence or a compound or a complex sentence with specific syntax patterns. When the author constitutes his main theses on the immanentist presuppositions, he states that the poetic language implies a certain degree of paradox, combining maximum organization with maximum informative value. The co-existence of two extremes in a literary (poetic) text is possible owing to the existence of two conflicting tendencies: towards automation and towards disautomation.

There are, however, two more questions: first, the degree of generalization of such research limited to the national and language material, second, the Serbian spiritual (religious) poetry is linguistically heterogeneous with a substantial layer of Old Church Slavonic contaminated with the traces of spoken Serbian language and the continual synthesis gradually going on to modern Serbian both everyday and poetic language. Another problem consists in the fact that it would be necessary to distinguish more strictly the language of various kinds or genres of literature (genera), their common denominators (loci communes, topoi) on the one hand and their gaps and contradictions on the other.

The main result of this part of the work consists in the fact that it demonstrated the permeation of various sound patterns, i. e. rhyme, alliteration and other phonic qualities. He even showed the different area and contextual realisations of the sacral language of spiritual poetry. This part of his research is closely connected with the role of the language as in ancient sacral texts including Old Hebrew (Torah, Old Testament) containing the enigmatic substance of the language (magic, numerology) as a cipher which needs to be deciphered.

The author is completely right if he assumes that one of the aims of the poetic language including the language of the verse is to demonstrate its sacral functions isolating it from the everyday communicative reality, to show the language as a powerful tool of a deep grasp of existence. He is also right if he connects the medieval spiritual poetry with that of Romanticism (though the double structure of the medieval Serbian is evident) and Modernism as all the three developmental epochs were mutually connected based on the estrangement as a tool of a more profound understanding of man and his world. Two epochal streams, however, stand aside: realism and postmodernism. While realism accentuated the minimizing of the interval between art and reality, postmodernism confronted the literariness and reality: literature (belles lettres) and art in general are based on a chain of repetitions, on intertextuality. But the difference between the former periods and streams under scrutiny and the latter ones (as there is also realist and postmodernist poetry) is not immense. The main aim is the same: to fill the gap between language and reality, to minimize the interval between them (in the Czech context of the 1970–1980s it was the so-called Šabouk’s team which dealt with this), to revitalize the poetic language on the basis of reality itself (e. g. the prosaisation of poetry) and to restore the past language layers. So there is another task for future researchers to involve also realism and postmodernism, possibly the avant-garde, if we take it into consideration as a poetically independent and autonomous phenomenon, into a complex analysis: realist and postmodernist poetry does exist and though it proclaimed rather non-poetic theses it represented only another method of how to develop the language of the verse further. Čarkić´s masterpiece is the analysis of the acathist with all the Serbian contextual circumstances.

One of his crucial monographs called On Poetic Language (LAMBERT Academic Publishing Saarbrücken 2016) consists of ten more or less autonomous chapters dealing with crucial problems of the state, status and development of poetic language. There are only a few specialists who systematically analyze these problems linked to the linguistic aspect of verse theory.

Čarkić’s views of the specific feature of poetic language are very close to my idea of any poetic text: his conceptions are based on the widened theory of classical structuralism with the semantic, semiotic, and stylistic constructions including genre theory. The starting point lies in the introductory chapter with its identification of lyric poetry concentrating on the elements of verse (specific graphic organization, specific rhythmical and specific sound organization). I have already quoted Josef Hrabák’s definition according to which the verse is a unit sui generis, and we sometimes tend to define it as a specific graphic, phonetic-phonological, and, last but not least, semantic-syntactic and stylistic entity not identical with any similar language structure. Though the author focuses on some of the famous quotations from Mukařovský and Jakobson going back to the Aristotelian generic classification, I would like to accentuate the neoclassicist division based on the graphic, readers’ concept of the genres linked to the problems of verse as well as the boundary between prose and verse which is not very transparent even in the research of recent times.

The study of the Romantic poetological invariant leads Čarkić to the study of the poetic language of some of the Serbian romantic poets. His conclusions confirm also my conviction based not only on the material of European Romanticism that the link to folk poetry is rather complicated, in no case spontaneous, sometimes very artificial and stylized, which is the very core of the author‘s cognitive background.

Brilliant is the following study “On Interjections in Romantic Poetry” especially because it explicates the intrinsic language quality of Romantic poetry in general. Why Romanticism is so often the object of Čarkić‘s interest can be answered by pointing out the South-Slavonic poetic tradition, the role of a specific type of Romanticism as well as Romanticism as a decisive moment in the evolution of the poetic genre system.²¹

Probably most inspiring is the author’s treatise “On Some Stylistic and Semantic Aspects of the Distortion of Adjective in Poetic Structures” though it is also very specific regarding the Serbian poetic material. The terms “deformation” or “distortion” were used to manifest the importance of the change in the function of these words (adjectives).

The monograph Models of Rhyme (Lambert, Saarbrücken 2017) is probably the most elaborate, full of concrete analyses, examples and case microstudies dealing with possibly the most important versological factor – the rhyme. After Zhirmunsky’s famous formalist treatise going back to the early 1920s and after many partial attempts of several specialists, Čarkić’s book is more fundamental, more prolific, going beyond the boundaries of the existing knowledge of this phenomenon; moreover, exploring several languages and poetries on the basis of rigorous consultations with linguists and literary scholars dealing with these problems in the national poetries they investigate.

The pathos of his monograph is linked to the strictly scholarly approach consisting of the firmly permeated methodology and terminology, trying to transcend the usual, traditional terms which are typical of various national poetries and theories of the verse to reach the general classification or typology and detailed characteristics of this phenomenon. Probably one of the most brilliant ideas Čarkić brings is the classification based on the sound more than on the syllable or the word. It is radically connected with the early ideas formulated by A. Bely in his Glossolalia very often criticized by famous literary theorists.

Milosav Čarkić was one of the theorists of the verse who grasped the holistic idea of the general image of the verse on the basis of permanent comparison, with regard to the national features of poetry the specific verse belongs to. That is possibly the problem concerning not only the topical state and situation of the poetry composed in a national language, but mainly the whole poetic and sound tradition which has been created for centuries.

While the pathos of his preceding monograph Models of Rhyme is linked to the strictly scholarly approach consisting of the firmly permeated methodology and terminology, trying to transcend the usual, traditional terms which are typical of various national poetries and theories of the verse to reach the general classification or typology and detailed characteristics of this phenomenon, this one (A Dictionary of Rhyme Terms. LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, Saarbrücken 2020) is based on various criteria of typology of rhymes, on several aspects of rhyme identification and definition as well as the designation and the generally acceptable denomination and classification and, as he puts it, the universality of rhyme which is based on the four principles of the universal code of nature: duality (parallelism), interaction (interrelatedness), dynamicity and repetitiveness.

The Czech theorist of verse Pavel Jiráček (1955–2020) whose memory this paper is devoted to studied Czech and Romance philology at Masaryk University in Brno and delivered his lectures in various institutions including the Faculty of Arts, the Educational Faculty of Masaryk University, Charles University, but for various reasons he gradually lost all of his jobs and at the end of his life he physically worked in the factory. At that time he came to me with a suggestion to deliver lectures on verse theory in the Institute of Slavonic Studies I headed and offered me a brand new book I decided to publish by our professional societies – Central European Centre of Slavonic Studies and the Czech Association of Slavists though he had already published three books in central publishing houses. The book on the theory of verse appeared two months after his premature death.

Jiráček opened a side window to a deeper understanding and perception of lyric poetry and its space as a really multidisciplinary investigation, returned to lyric poetry its intrinsic meaning and opened a relatively new field of research and its inventive methods.²²

His first book Lyric Rhythm: On the Connection of the Sound and the Meaning of the Verse (2007) was closely linked to similar types of research in the past it tries to continue. He reached another culmination in another of his books The Meaning and the Subjectivity in Lyric Poetry: Cognitive Structures in Lyric Imagination (2008) in which he – under the impact of cognitive science – interpreted the hidden layers of the sound in poetry in connection with its imagination which continues in his third book The Cognitive Interpretation of the Czech Verse: in the Context of the Metric Theory of Miroslav Červenka (2009). His association of conceptual spaces of lyric poetry, the lyric subject and, above all, the forms of rhythm and lyric world consider the problems of lyric poetry in another way. Jiráček demonstrated his investigation on analyses of several lyric poems written, among others, by famous Czech poets, some of them were several times unsuccessful candidates for the Nobel Prize for literature, which is, of course, not so important, such as Otokar Březina, Vladimír Holan, Josef Hora, but also probably one of the most significant poets of European Romanticism Karel Hynek Mácha, a Catholic poet Bohuslav Reynek, Jan Zahradníček or a brilliant lyric poet Jan Skácel, and, of course, Paul Verlaine, whom the specialist in Romance poetry could not ignore.

His last book published posthumously in 2020 From Words to Lyric Consciousness / Od slova k lyrickému vědomí (2020) consists of four chapters and many supplements in which the author presented his experiments verifying his theses: the kernel of the lyric poetry is represented by the word in the lyric poetry, the perception of the existentially spatial rhythm of syllables in lyric words.²³

The first chapter contains, for example, the subchapters called Rhythm as a Movement of the Subject and the Values, Fictional Worlds or Imaginative Affective Horizons of Lyric Poetry, The Lyric Word as Real and Horribly Real, The Search for the Coordinates of the Sensational Meanings of the Spatiality, The Subject as Rhythm of Significants, Existentially Spatial Rhythm of the Nearness in Lyric Words, The Linguistic Analysis of the Syllables and the Experience of Movements in Existentional Spatiality of the Syllables of Lyric Words. The author deals, among other aspects, with the possibilities of prediction of the rhythmic value of movements in existential spatiality of syllables, with the empirical research of the perception of light and dark existential spatiality of syllables of the Czech lyric words, the dark existential spatiality with movements, existential spatiality of the silence with or without movements, the possibilities of the prediction of the existentially spatial rhythm of syllables, words in lyric poetry and their existentially syllabic rhythm etc.

The section “Supplement” contains, for example, the paving of 2D pictures of the lyric consciousness by syllables, words and word groups in František Hrubín’s translations of Verlaine’s poems. This section further contains, for example, the psycho-semantic test of the investigation of the perception of the existentially spatial syllabic rhythm in Czech syllables, the analysis of the thirty lyric images, the test of the investigation of the perception of the existential spatial statements etc.

Pavel Jiráček’s approach is linked with the bonds between the sound and spatial-axiological and colour significance of the syllables and words and the specific features in lyric words in Czech poetry (but not only) and the deep psychic perception of lyric poetry in all its aspects in general.

To sum up: The three examples or case studies in the theory of verse connected with the Czech or, more widely, Slavonic tradition and material deal with the following spheres of verse theory:

1) The traditional theory of verse linked to immanent methods with remnants of classical positivist history, mainly formalist and structuralist aiming at the attempts at the exactization of the verse theory and with quantitative methods (the two Brno conferences of the 1960s).

2) The specific current based on the lexical-stylistic and semantic analysis of the verse on the comparative Slavonic and European material – Milosav Čarkić as a lonely rider in the field of the theory of verse – traditions of Andrey Bely and Kirill Taranovsky.

3) Pavel Jiráček – rhythmical-somatic-semantic and phonic conception at the background of psycho-philosophical notion of the verse (Pavel Jiráček).

Literature

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Ivo Pospíšil, prof. PhDr., DrSc., Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, ORCID: 0000-0001-8358-0765

Kontakt: Ivo.Pospisil@phil.muni.cz