Jiří Wolker na pozadí jubilejního roku

The present contribution discusses the changing position of the personality and work of Jiří Wolker (1900–1924) in his time and in the course of hundred years since his death, also in the context of other prominent Czech poets of the 20th century. It is not a big discovery that his personality and his poetic and other works have always been the object of envy, hatred and ostracism, passionate disputes that are still surprising today with their sharpness and even brutality on the one hand, but also one-sided adoration on the other. These controversies – as is almost always the case – testify more to polemics and criticisms than to the poet himself, whose work, even if limited to an extremely short period of time, as is the case with genius creators, belongs to the top of not only Czech, but also European and world literary creativity. The article tries to present the different positions of Wolker's assessment and the originality of his poetics, which consists in the intermingling and permeation of poetological features of various literary currents and in the strong position of the Neoclassicism of the 20th century, and at the same time draws attention to "eternal" thematic and poetic values. Even though the poet had a clearly formulated political opinion, and in this sense developed an activity responding to specific conditions of his time, i.e. mainly the late 10s and 1920s of the 20th century, with his transcendences he grasps the fate of man and the world in the timeless dimensions of justice and dignity.