Born Nov. 16, 1810 Prague.
Greatest poet of Czech Romanticism, perhaps the greatest of all Czech poets.
Born of poor parents he was influenced as a student by the Czech national revival and by English and Polish Romantic literature.
Other sources of inspiration were his wanderings amid ruined castles in the Bohemian countryside and a journey to northern Italy (1834).
In 1836 he took up a legal post in Litomérice but soon sucumbed to pneumonia when not quite 26 years old.
After schoolboy attempts to write in German, he began to write poems (1830), sketches and novels in Czech. Practically all his prose works remained unfinished but they exhibit a mastery not previously attained by writers in the newly epic Máj (1836, May). Strongly Byronic in subject this poem contains four cantos and two intermezzos. It concerns Vilém, an outlaw known as the "fortest lord" and the "man of dread" who kills the man who has seduced his beloved Jarmila, unaware that the offender is his father. While in prison, Vilém meditates on the "mystic elements" of nature and struggles with the loneliness of the condemned; finally he is beheaded.
Coldly received at the time (the Romantic nationalist demanded a less equivocal "message") Máj has exercised an almost magical fascination on Czech poets and critics of the 20th century.
Mácha´s letters and diaries Dílo Karla Hynka Máchy edited by K. Janský (3 vol., 1948-50) are an essential supplement and back-ground to his poetry.
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