[3] He studied at a grammar school in Slaný from 1862, where he was a classmate of Václav Beneš Třebízský, also in Prague and in 1872 graduated from Klatovy.

But in 1873, he transferred to the Faculty of Arts of Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, where he studied history, philosophy and Romance philology.

Through the intercession of Leopold, Count von Thun und Hohenstein, in 1877 he was appointed secretary of the Prague Czech Polytechnic, and later became a professor of modern science and was awarded an honorary doctorate.

In 1901 he, along with Antonín Dvořák, was knighted, and Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I. appointed him a member of the Upper House of the Imperial Council in Vienna.

[4] He also wrote epic poetry, plays, prose and literary essays and translated widely from various languages, introducing e.g. Dante, Goethe, Shelley, Baudelaire, Poe, and Whitman to Czech literature.

His foreign orientation became a source of criticism in the late 1870s, he was deemed to be overlooking local thematic and, in effect, the needs of the Czech national life.

Eliška Krásnohorská recognized his poetic talent, but had objections to the romantic utilization of foreign sources, which, in her view, didn't contribute to the fight for national independence.

[3][5] Examples of these critics are (the three years older) Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, who only viewed him as a good translator, and F. X. Šalda.

[5] The generation following (e. g. Viktor Dyk, Lev Blatný and Jaroslav Seifert) subsequently fully understood the merit of his work.

He wanted to write poetry that would be comparable to other European works and move the Czech literature to a higher level.