The product of nearly thirty years of fascination with Ivan Blatný (1919–1990), one of the most talented Czech poets of the 20th century who remained in the UK from 1948 onwards, “lost” in psychiatric hospitals, The Poet is a monographic novel of six hundred pages which is based on a huge amount of materials concerning Blatný. It is not just a report on the tragic fate of a man, on the urge to create, the desire for freedom and the impact of isolation but also a vivid image of Czech culture, especially literature, from the end of World War I to 1948.