PĚT PODOB EXPERIMENTU V ČESKÉ POEZII DVACÁTÉHO STOLETÍ
FIVE FORMS OF EXPERIMENT IN CZECH POETRY OF THE 20TH CENTURY

Summary/Abstract: Experimental poetic writing comes to existence at the end of the 19th century and during the 20th century. Experiment is a purposeful and long-lasting creative effort to contradict contemporaneous aesthetic standards in a new artistic expression and simultaneously to motivate this creative effort rationally, to reflect it by idividual statements, manifests or programme statements. The most important experiment, at the time not appreciated sufficiently even by the authors themselves, was the verslibrism of the 1890’s. In the frame of symbolism free verse, that is a verse with no firm number of syllables, is used with the tendency to gain more space to express new messages and to negate deep-seated conventional limited poetic forms. The modern poets who gathered around the Almanach na rok 1914 before the WWI considered free verse to be one of the characteristic signs of modern art. As for the artistic realization of the pre-war modern poetry programme, the outcomes are relatively scarce and its ideas and ideas of civilism were best pronounced in works of S.K. Neumann, in his Nové zpěvy and in the collection of his programme essays and manifests Ať žije život. Poetic experiment was fully developed by the avant-garde generation between the wars, by Poetism and Surrealism. After the avant-garde generation, Group 42 established themselves with distinguished literature experiment. They wanted to create a vital relationship with the concrete reality of the urban life and to establish a new myth of everydayness based on this swelling and pragmatical lively rubble. The climax of artistic experiment came during the 1960’s, with the era of Experimental poetry. Unlike traditional poetry it uses language not as means of expression, but as the building material and the theme of the writing. In effort to exclude the author’s consciousness it completely denies the cathegory of lyrical subject. It decomposes and analyses the natural language into the smallest fragments, into sounds and letters. These basic denotative, graphic and rhythmic elements are used to create an experimental poem according to different rules than to those used in natural language and in traditional poetry.

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