romanticists, principally to Novalis of the "blaue Blume" observance. As Novalis in his "Heinrich von Offerdingen" and in his beautiful "Hymnen an die Nacht" endeavored to create a "new poetry of poetry," highly elevated beyond the earthly striving, so Macha throughout his entire work tried to show that "art is the victory of spirit over nature and that the working of poetry is shown in a slow liberation of slaves from the grip of the matter. Slaves are we men."
At the same time, we cannot help noticing a very marked vein of glowing Slavonic sensitiveness and dreaminess in his work, and his "frightened feverish imagination," as he characterized it himself in one of his letters, may be directly traced to the influences of the Polish literature, especially to the two poets of the sister nation whom he most loved and revered: to Adam Mickiewicz and Julius Slowacki.
When four years after Goethe's death, in 1836, Macha's "romance in verses"—the lyrico-epic poem "May"—was published it was a literary event of prime importance. It may be said, perhaps, that the poem, or as the author preferred to call it, his "romance," lacks in solid construction of its plot and clear development of its main theme, but it cannot be denied that the absence of those qualities is more than amply compensated for by the beauty of the poetic expression, by a delicate shading of rich colors and by the use of musical sounds and effects which hitherto were wholly unknown to and unheard of in Czech poetry. The great historian of the Czech nation, Francis Palacky, was one of the first critics to recognize and appreciate "Macha's egregious phantasy and splendid power of purely pictorial seeing."
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