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First published in 1853, A Bouquet is a landmark collection of ballads by Karel Jaromír Erben, compiled from his studies of Slavic folklore. The thirteen poems are dotted with murder and mayhem: graves opening and the dead walking the earth, the animate becoming the inanimate and vice versa, ogres and monsters of lake and wood, and human transformations reminiscent of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Through these dark and vivid tales, Erben focused on women and their role in life and society, with the relationship between mother and child at the heart of the work. Regarded as a masterpiece of Czech literature, A Bouquet inspired artists across disciplines, including Antonín Dvořák, who composed a series of symphonic poems based on these tales.