According to the embassy, local councilor Martin Cook came up with the idea of honoring a Czech poet who wrote, for example, the Old Residence collection in Ipswich. In addition to him and the Czech Ambassador to Britain Libor Sečka, the deputy mayor Jane Riley also took part in Thursday’s inauguration of the street.
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“It seemed to me that we should honor not only those who are on offer immediately – the personalities who built and operated the hospital – but also the no less stunning and often hidden talents that were among the patients there, such as Blatný,” said Councilor Cook. .
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St. Clements operated until 2002, after closing it had offices and recently the developer rebuilt the complex into housing.
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Blatný, who went into British exile as a respected poet after the communist coup in 1948, soon began treatment in England due to mental problems. He was permanently interned with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia in 1954 in Essex, from where he was transferred to St. John’s Psychiatric Hospital in 1967. Clements in Ipswich. It was here that he met Nurse Frances Meacham, who sent his manuscripts to the Škvorecký publishing house in Toronto, where his collections Old Residence and Bixley Auxiliary School were later published.
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Blatný’s friends had long believed that the poet in British exile had completely ceased to create, and his verses from the psychiatric hospital were therefore considered by many to be a revelation.
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