Lietuvių poezija

This anthology stands as one of the most comprehensive single-volume records of Lithuanian exile poetry produced in the diaspora, gathering eighty poets whose creative lives spanned from the late nineteenth century through the early 1970s. By explicitly positioning itself as a corrective to the censored 1967 Vilnius anthology, the volume encodes an act of cultural resistance: it insists that the full Lithuanian literary tradition cannot be understood without the voices displaced by war and occupation. The editor's preface and Viktorija Skrupskelytė's critical essay provide not merely an introduction but a theoretical framework for understanding what exile does to a literary tradition—arguing that diaspora poetry, far from stagnating, underwent genuine formal and thematic evolution over its first quarter century.

For Lithuanian heritage communities in North America, the anthology served simultaneously as a literary reference, a pedagogical resource, and a statement of collective identity. Printed by the Draugas press and issued under the Ateitis imprint, it emerges from the institutional infrastructure that Lithuanian Catholics in Chicago built to sustain cultural continuity across generations of displacement. Its survival in the Žiburio archive connects Detroit's heritage school community directly to that broader Chicago-centered publishing network, and the volume's critical apparatus makes it unusually valuable for classroom and research contexts alike.

Anthology compilation and diaspora publishing: by gathering 80 exile poets whose work was scattered across books and periodicals and was excluded from or misrepresented in Soviet-controlled Lithuanian anthologies, this volume actively preserved the canon of Lithuanian exile literature for diaspora communities and future researchers.