В этой статье современная сербская лирическая поэзия рассматривается с точки зрения эстетики. Согласно позиции автора, история современной сербской лирики начинается после Первой мировой войны и развивается в двух литературных направлениях: модернизм и авангард. В границах этих направлений существовали следующие основные течения: экспрессионизм, зенитизм, дадаизм, примитивизм, сюрреализм и др. Лирика рассматривается как отдельный, основной вид поэзии, который с начала до наших дней сохранил две особенности: связь с эмоциями и мелодию поэтического языка, свидетельствующую о связи поэзии с музыкой. Используется введенное Д.Н. Овсянико-Куликовским понятие «лирической эмоции», которая представлает собой ритмически оранизованную модификацию аффектов. Что касается отношения лирического поэта к лирической эмоции, автор соглашается с Гегелем, который объективирует это отношение, требуя отвлечься от чувства, но только «в самом чувстве». В качестве основных методологических понятий используются категории эстетики, и прежде всего «лирическое». Программные тексты, т.е. манифесты определенных поэтических направлений, тоже содержат методологические понятия. Особенное внимание уделено языку лирических стихотворений, их мелодии, которая соприкасается с музыкой, хотя звучность и значение слов препятствуют уравниванию поэтической мелодии с музыкальной. Концепция материнской мелодии, разработанная известным сербским поэтом М. Настасиевичем, также служит одним из основных ориентиров в этой статье. Автор – составитель «Антологии лирической поэзии»: такую поэзию нужно отличать от интеллектуальной сербской поэзии, которая развивалась во второй половине XX века.

Most anthologies of Serbian poetry contain the word “poetry” in their title, whereas the editors of only a few among these have opted for the phrase “lyrical poetry” in the title (An Anthology of New Serbian Lyrical Poetry edited by Bogdan Popovic, An Anthology of the Latest Lyrical Poetry edited by Sima Pandurovic, A New Anthology of Serbian Lyrical Poetry edited by Svetislav Stefanovic...). In both cases, no rationale was offered for using either “poetry” or “lyrical poetry” in the title. It was only Bogdan Popovic who, in the “Foreword” to his Anthology, offered a genre-based distinction between lyrical poems on the one hand, and purely descriptive, didactic, narrative, satirical, humorous, political poems and ballads, as well as those written for a particular occasion, on the other. It appears that, generally speaking, not enough attention has been paid to this problem in our poetology. Thus the almanac “The Impossible” (1930) published the results of an opinion poll involving members of the Serbian surrealist circle. One of the questions in the poll was: “Not considering poetry a literary genre, how do you distinguish this concept from those of lyrical poetry, ‘lyricism’, poeticality, poetic art, etc.?” Answering this question, however, the participants in the poll did not seem to be particularly willing to provide a genre-based distinction between poetry and lyrical poetry, nor to deal with the more general, closely related concepts of poeticality and lyricism.

In the case of the present anthology, opting for the term “lyrical poetry” has not only a genre-based but also deeper theoretical and aesthetic justification. Contrary to the often-voiced opinion that, from the end of the 19th century onwards, all poetry is lyrical, we consider that, particularly in the 20th century, this claim is not justifiable at all. From the very beginnings of artistic creation, from the moment of separating itself from the original syncretic union with music and dance, lyrical poetry has manifested itself as a special, highly characteristic poetic mode. We discover the elements of its specific nature both in the subjective, experiential sphere and in the sphere of poetic expression. Taking the element of subjectivity into consideration first, the example of Archilochus, the first known lyrical poet, unequivocally proves that this poet relies mostly on emotions. Archilochus is more direct than the objective, epically inclined Homer; thus the original division between the lyric and the epic was created. The third genre unit, tragedy, as a form of drama, was later singled out and theoretically established by Aristotle.

Keeping to the subjective aspect of lyrical poetry, we shall try to outline a brief historical overview of this poetic mode up to the present day. In the Middle Ages, it was established that, apart from emotions, there exists the intellect as a principle of artistic creation. Later on, based on this duality characterising the process of creation, there would emerge two very different approaches to the creative process: the classicist and the sentimentalist. The former is based on the intellect, the latter on emotions. Sentimentalism flared into romanticism, which banished the intellect from the subjective sphere of creation, thus providing the continuity of pure lyricism. At the same time, however, romanticism pointed out the danger of giving emotions too prominent a role in the creation of a lyrical poem. That is the main reason for the emergence of an aesthetic principle, that of Hegel, which must be taken into consideration in any approach to lyrical poetry. In his Aesthetics, Hegel says: “...if our heart may find relief when its woes and joys are comprehended, described and expressed by means of words, then a poetic outburst can really provide the same kind of service for us, but it is not restricted to the role of, as it were, home-made medicine; on the contrary, it has a more exalted calling, that is, task: to liberate our spirit not from feeling but within feeling”. Feelings, thus, receive an artistic superstructure by way of, to begin with, “our woes and joys [being] comprehended, described and expressed by means of words”, following which a “poetic outburst” has “an exalted calling, that is task: to liberate our spirit not from feeling but within feeling”. It is precisely this liberation “not from feeling but within feeling” that should be the guiding light to any true lyrical poet. What is essential here is allegiance to feeling, because there is no lyrical poetry without it. At the same time, in view of the fact that it is prone to expansion, sentimental outbursts, this feeling should be kept under control to prevent its excessive manifestation; this control, however, should not be imposed from the outside but realised within the feeling itself. In this way, feelings are disciplined in lyrical poetry without diminishing their authenticity.

This control over feeling in a way manifested itself in symbolism, but later on it was understood by some poets as mere suppression of feeling. That is to say, this control was not effected in the Hegelian manner, within the feeling itself, but imposed from the outside by the intellect, which, as the 20th century proved, is capable of poetic creation; this creation, however, effected predominantly or even solely by means of the intellect, could no longer be purely lyrical. Generally speaking, this kind of poetic differs from the kind presupposed by the term “lyrical” in the title of our anthology. For the time being, therefore, we are not interested in poetry which is not lyrical, poetry we might describe as rational or intellectual, characterised by different poetic (in a more general sense of the word) qualities, and having a different, primarily cognitive function.

We single out just one more principle essential, from the creative point of view, for lyrical poetry: the assumption of the existence of lyrical emotion, as a specific emotional quality. At the beginning of the 20th century, a Russian exponent of the psychological school, Ovsyaniko- Kulikowski, voiced the opinion that the psychology of lyrical poetry differs from all the other types of creation. Lyrical poetry is based on emotions, developing through a gradual abatement of the original affects – fear, anger, rage, which still linger on. Lyrical emotion is derived from some affect brought about through the influence of rhythm. In the course of time mankind grew accustomed to experiencing lyrical emotions, and this ability became the basis for lyrical creation, pointing to music as its higher manifestation: “This form of creation, whose essence and objective, in the final analysis, is the creation of a harmonic rhythm, to move the soul, we call lyrical”, maintains Ovsyaniko- Kulikowski, adding, “the specific character of the lyrical is based on emotion which a man experiences due to the rhythm of various forms – sounds, colours, lines, feelings, and the like.” He goes on to say: “The type of creation aimed at producing and developing rhythms brought about by emotions is the one we call lyrical – as opposed to all the other types of creation which may involve lyrical emotions but whose essence and objectives do not consist in creating and developing rhythms.”

It now falls upon us to explain another term contained in the title of the present anthology – the term modern or modernity. We must say that, despite the fact that this term is used very often indeed when speaking about literature, possibly even more frequently in the case of other arts, painting in particular, it is not the most suitable one. The use of this term without any specific explanation leaves room for doubt because of its polysemantic nature, due to what it means on its own, on the one hand, and to its links with other, opposite terms, on the other. To make things clear at once, we do not use this term in a predominantly evaluative sense. If we did so, this term, pointing immediately to its opposite – traditional, would overshadow the latter in terms of value. That is to say, modern lyrical poetry would a priori be more valuable, artistically more accomplished than traditional lyrical poetry because traditionality has a ring of outdatedness, obsolescence to it. On the other hand, if we linked the term modern to the term classical, which is also habitual practice, then again the term classical, in the axiological sense of proven, established value, carries greater weight than modern, whose value is just being formed at the moment of its coming into being. Additional misunderstandings concerning the use of the terms classical and modern arise out of their diachronic aspect, their tendency to shift in time. In what is possibly its most widespread sense, the term classical is synonymous with antique values, something which is established, unchangeable, or something which, due to its well-known high artistic quality, represents a standard by which everything created after it is measured. In a different sense of the term, whatever precedes romanticism is described as classical: apart from classical in the sense of antique, this also means classicist, as a characteristic of an artistic, that is, literary movement. In our time, however, from the point of view of modern art of the 20th century, even romanticism may be considered classical, as, in its turn, some future modernity will consider the present modernism of the 20th century classical.

Being of the opinion that “modern”, at the moment of coming into being, is not automatically more valuable than what preceded it, but still unable to use the term “contemporary”, because the period under consideration involves distant past as well, we use the term “modern” as very closely connected with the term “new”. This theoretical and aesthetic term is less fraught with connotations of value than the term “modern”, and at the same time it presupposes the introduction of certain previously existing modifications or entirely new artistic qualities into Serbian lyrical poetry. Deciding on the title of his own anthology, Bogdan Popovic acted similarly, but moving in the opposite direction. The publisher wanted him to compile an anthology of “modern Serbian lyrical poetry”, and using the term “new” in its title, he identified it with “modern”. Even if he had used the syntagm “modern lyrical poetry” in the title of his anthology, it need not necessarily preclude our using the same title for our anthology, bearing in mind the above-mentioned tendency of the term “modern” to shift in time.

The terms “modern” and “new” are not used pertaining to artistic and aesthetic phenomena only, but also to the non-aesthetic spheres of human activities, even to nature itself (“new worlds”, for example). If we focus on the links between these terms and art, that is, lyrical poetry, then we must conclude that, rising above coincidence and superficiality, based on a number of various elements of the arts, they acquire the status of aesthetic categories. The phrase lyrical poetry from the title of this anthology also points to aesthetics first, because lyrical poetry as a distinct artistic genre may be completely comprehended only in an appropriate, most general context. And the boundaries of that context are determined by the concept of lyricism, which presupposes both subjective and objective lyrical qualities, and the concept of lyrical, as the most general supraordinate concept pertaining to lyrical poetry, that is, as an aesthetic category. That is why we have opted for an aesthetic approach to modern Serbian lyrical poetry. Such an approach encompasses all the elements bearing on the creation of a lyrical poem, as well as all the aspects of meaning that such a poem presupposes as a work of art using language. It points to a categorial universality that is at the same time the formative and axiological principle of lyrical poetry. Axiological in the sense that only that which fulfils the requirement of categorial universality could find itself a place in this anthology.

Spanning a period of 70 years (1840-1910) in his anthology, Bogdan Popović established that this period witnessed the emergence and development of a new direction of Serbian lyrical poetry, its gradual enrichment through innovations. As he says in his foreword to the anthology, Branko Radičević with his unrefined, “primitive poetry, half-folk halfartistic themes and diction, starts a kolo (Serbian folk dance, translator’s note) relying on folk lyrical poetry. That is characteristic of the emergence of any original lyrical poetry in the history of literature. Following him, there appear poets who exhibit deeper emotions, more intense temperament, more varied themes, and are more artistic when it comes to form (Jakšić and Jovanović). They are followed by poets whose poetry is characterised by the predominance of imagination, whose diction is primarily of a painterly kind (Vojislav Ilić). These, in their turn, are followed by poets whose poetry exhibits formal artistic elegance of the highest order, refinement, with elements of rhetoric, poetry primarily stylistically oriented, whose diction is fully developed and intricately ramified, poetry characterised by virtuosity (Ducić, Šantić, Rakić). Finally, there comes restlessness, exhaustion, certain finer and more complex emotions, irony, pessimism (along with affirmation of life), some anarchy, familiarity, personal confessions too candid, formally lax, stylistically irregular and vague, often entangled, “secession” and decadence, containing, however, the seeds of “renewal”. This amounts, to a great extent, to the arrival of primitives within the framework of high cultural heritage – neo-barbarism”.

Not agreeing completely with such a generalised evaluation of a historical period of Serbian lyrical poetry, because this assessment emphasises “the continuity and regularity of [its] development”, which points to the unacceptable idea of continuous “progress” in art, we must at the same time give its author credit for a synthetic judgement which is, for the most part, lucid and almost unparalleled in our history and theory of literature. The corollary of this judgement is that the seventy-year period of development of new Serbian lyrical poetry may be regarded as an organic whole. We may say that that in the course of an approximately equally long, that is, slightly longer period of development of modern Serbian lyrical poetry spanned by this anthology (1920-1995), a new direction of lyrical creation was established, one which exhibits continuity and may be regarded as a certain organic whole. That is to say, this anthology shows that Serbian lyrical poetry between the two World Wars develops into post-World-War-Two Serbian lyrical poetry, continuing from its starting points between the great wars and enriching them, more or less successfully, with new lyrical qualities. The specific task of the editor of this anthology is to point out the seventy-five-year continuity of modern Serbian lyrical poetry following the turning point that coincides with the publication of Bogdan Popovic’s anthology. The question, then, is: what is new or modern in Serbian lyrical poetry after the period spanned by the above-mentioned anthology?

To begin with, we must say that, contrary to some Serbian poetry scholars, we place the real beginning of new or modern Serbian lyrical poetry in the period following the First World War. There are, however, views that the decisive changes in Serbian lyrical poetry occurred earlier, that the actual process began after the year 1900. Such views are not entirely unacceptable, but for the sake of precision it should be said that such changes merely presaged what was to develop fully only after the First World War. Trying to determine this turning point, we shall adhere to the universality that the aesthetic approach requires. That is to say, we shall first take into consideration certain aesthetic categories, as well as certain poetic movements, which are closely connected with the thenprevalent general artistic movements. The above-mentioned poetic movements may also be considered aesthetic categories for a number of reasons. First of all, they do not pertain to a single art form – literature, that is, poetry – but more often than not to other art forms as well, although literary and artistic movements often do not coincide in time. Also, certain poetic movements are often terminologically derived from linguistic forms pertaining to corresponding subjective or subjectiveobjective phenomena: impressionism is based on impression, expressionism on expression, symbolism on symbols. Even when there is no such linguistic coincidence, it is precisely known which subjective qualities these movements are based on – for example, in the case of romanticism they are emotions and imagination. Finally, the fact that specific poetic movements are linguistically “fixed” in works of poetry points to the objective dimension of these movements. Thus poetic movements fulfil all three criteria pertaining to the formation of aesthetic categories: they “cover” various art forms and are linked to both the subjective and objective dimension of a work of literature, in this case a lyrical poem.

We shall follow the above-mentioned changes throughout the development of modern Serbian lyrical poetry, relying on specific aesthetic categories and always bearing in mind that the lyrical is the most important among these categories. Before we apply some of these categories to the development of modern Serbian lyrical poetry, however, we must make a necessary distinction. The beginnings of modern Serbian lyrical poetry, including the watershed period before and during the First World War, are connected with two more general creative options which may be considered complex literary movements: modernism, heralded by expressionism, and the avant-garde. In our literary studies there exist a number of often conflicting views concerning these creative options. Without considering such views individually, we shall merely formulate our own view in as much detail as is necessary to comprehend the more general context of the initial phase of modern Serbian lyrical poetry and the role of this context in its later development. If, on the one hand, we accept the fact that expressionism paves the way for modernism, we must say that, on the other, it did not determine the general framework of the initial phase of modern Serbian lyrical poetry but remained in touch with other movements and “isms” of the twenties. All these movements, both general and personal ones, endeavoured to gain predominance in the turbulent developments of the period in question. A whole lot of “isms” emerged during this period, and in order to understand them, one should, first of all, take into consideration the relationship between modernism and the avant-garde. A distinction should be made between these two concepts, but they should be considered parallel to each other, not subsuming one into the other. The absolutisation of the avant-garde after the First World War, which occasionally occurs, is particularly unacceptable. But it is not necessary to emphasise the modernist character of the avant-garde either. The avant-garde is a radical poetic movement encompassing several “isms” in post-war Serbian lyrical poetry – dadaism, futurism, zenthism, presurrealism, even surrealism, which retained elements of the avant-garde throughout. It strives for a total break-up with tradition. Modernism, however, does not renounce tradition but tries to renew and enrich it.

More generally speaking, individual poetic movements should not be absolutised either. We must always bear in mind individual poets who never completely fit into particular schools of poetry. When considering such individualities, we merely detect elements of certain poetic movements: the more outstanding the individuality, the fewer such elements we perceive. After the First World War, therefore, Crnjanski, Dedinac, even Vinaver, may be considered modernists, whereas Rastko Petrovic is a distinct poetic individuality, combining modernist and avant-garde tendencies, including surrealism, which he declared himself against in his theoretical writings. Relying on particular poetic movements as aesthetic categories, or on certain theoretical and genre concepts, we must always, therefore, strive for a balanced relationship between the general and the individual. In our opinion, the sum total of categories providing access to the realm of modern Serbian lyrical poetry is as follows: new; beautiful; dynamic; expressionism; impressionism; neo-romanticism; neo-symbolism; primitivism; zenithism; dadaism; surrealism; ethnological- folklore-religious-mythical; the native tune; lyrical transcendence and lyrical abstraction; emotional and rational (intellectual).

* * *

The new or “latest” gets mentioned particularly frequently in Crnjanski’s “Explanation of ‘Sumatra’” (1920), one of the first and most important texts containing the principles of modernist poetics. According to Crnjanski, the latest poetry should reject all the “useful, popular, hygienic duties”, but at the same time it must not “sleep, as readers often imagine, like a beauty in an ivory tower”. In these views of Crnjanski, it is not difficult to recognise, on the one hand, opposition to the pragmatic-utilitarian attitude of Jovan Skerlić, and on the other, disagreement with the “l’art pour l’art” theory of Bogdan Popović, who, as Crnjanski’s editor, invited Crnjanski to expound his poetic credo. What he was particularly against is the pseudoromantic sentimentalism (“the adorable lovey-dovey verses, rhymes chrysanthemums...”). Against this, Crnjanski emphasises the coming of “new thoughts, new ecstasies, new morals”. New poetry means “restlessness, a revolution in expression, feelings, thinking”. What is also new is opting for free verse, which, according to Crnjanski, is no fashion trend pertaining to form only – this verse form arises as a “consequence of our subject matter”. That is what makes free-verse forms original and “full-blooded”.

The most important and far-reaching aspect of Crnjanski’s text is the predominantly content-oriented definition of free verse, that is, poetic expression in general. It is in accordance with certain thenprevalent aesthetic views. Thus a music critic, Eduard Hanslick, maintains that a tone is neither language nor a sign but a “thing”, as Sartre would later claim concerning lyrical poetry and painting. That is why, according to Crnjanski, the most important thing is to “express the changing rhythm of moods”, to provide “an accurate picture of thoughts in as spiritual a manner as possible”. Of the metrical aspect of this “changing rhythm of moods” Crnjanski would speak two years later in a programmatic text entitled “In Favour of Free Verse”, also very important. According to him, artistic lyrical poetry is “sublime pleasure, and free verse, with its rhythm of being half-asleep, entirely connected to the rhythm of thoughts, new with the coming of each new mood, freed from the pounding of fettered rhythm, is the highest form of expression”. Rhythm should be linked to moods because it is “an internal, not external thing”. Therefore, “we must not take sorrow and joy in the same rhythm. To put it simply: each subject matter has its own rhythm”. And “rhythm is ecstasy, not the iamb and trochee of grammar but iamb and trochee of the soul”. Of particular importance is Crnjanski’s claim that new verse must be created in the spirit of our language and tradition, first and foremost the tradition of our folk poetry.

A number of views from the above-mentioned texts of Crnjanski may be linked to some similar or opposite views, both from the preceding period and the period during which those texts were written. The only difference is that Crnjanski’s views are expressed in a manifestolike and poetically more consistent manner, and that they establish a new poetic practice, which will be in evidence throughout the development of modern Serbian lyrical poetry, right down to the present day. If, according to Crnjanski, one of the basic questions is how to express different moods through new rhythms in lyrical poetry, we may say that Dučić raised the same question fifteen years earlier. In his poem “The Road” (1906), the poet says:

If I could find some new rhythm strong
And proud skill whose name I do not know,
Fearlessly to find that road so long
That from pain to rhyming verse does go.

........................................

And with the poem done not feel the pain
Which nothing can make disappear,
That such woe in my soul does remain
For which I had neither word nor tear.

As we can see, Dučić’s wishes have to do with bringing the content into harmony with form, the experience into conformity with the expression, reflecting the perennial dilemma pertaining to linguistic statements in poetry. The problem of bringing the content and linguistic expression into harmony would, during the course of the 20th century, find its place within the framework of denomination as an important concept in poetic theory. Dučić’s fear that language can never fully express the contents of the soul belongs to the theory of the inexpressible, and runs contrary to the absolutisation of language which is especially in evidence in the closing decades of this century.

In the texts entitled “Verse or Poem” and “More Freedom for Verse” (1912), Svetislav Stefanović, like Crnjanski after him, points out that verse is determined by content and speaks in favour of expressing thoughts and emotions through verse in as unrestricted a manner as possible. While Stefanović points out that poets “of the English language, which is immeasurably rich in rhyme, treat their verse and rhyme very freely indeed”, Crnjanski, in his text “In Favour of Free Verse”, would maintain: “Our language has no tradition of rhyme. On the contrary. It has neither sought it nor does it like it. The versification of folk poems does not recognise it. And free verse rejects it. It does not occur in our latest lyrical poetry.” Crnjanski’s resolute declaration against rhyme reveals, on the one hand, intense striving for the new, which will indeed manifest itself through free verse in the first phase of modern Serbian lyrical poetry. On the other hand, the use of rhyme in Crnjanski’s own poetry is by no means rare. Throughout the development of modern Serbian lyrical poetry, the opposition between free verse and rhymed verse has not been an issue of prime importance.

Before Crnjanski and Stefanović, Milan Ćurčin also declared himself as a devotee of the new, using free verse as an example. Stanislav Vinaver, too, claimed that various moods can most appropriately be expressed by means of free verse.

Crnjanski sees modern poetry as a “confession of new faiths”, and when, speaking of it, he mentions “our obscurity – or sickness, as some would have it”, he obviously has Skerlić in mind, because the latter, on the eve of the First World War, very sternly criticised the poetry of Dis, as well as that of Pandurović, on account of “sickness”. Skerlić extended the concept of “sickness” to include, according to him, whatever “the false modernism” brought: the “tepidity, vagueness or skepticism” and also the “obscurity” that Crnjanski speaks of. Being very much against these manifestations of “sickness”, Skerlić very resolutely embraced Taine’s maxim: “Poetry is health.” The categorial pair of concepts healthy-sick, however, is not the only “instrument” of approach to Serbian poetry which lacks aesthetic qualities altogether.

The category of ideological, used quite often almost throughout the development of modern Serbian lyrical poetry, also lacks such qualities. What is important, however, is the fact that at the very beginning of this development some new aesthetic categories were used to counteract the above-mentioned non-aesthetic categories: they would prove their relevance throughout the 20th century. Again, it was Svetislav Stefanović who, like Crnjanski, stood against Skerlić’s criteria of “healthy” and “sick”.

In the text “Critical Uproar and the Latest Moderna” (moderna – a literary movement in Serbia and Croatia at the beginning of the 20th century, translator’s note), published in “Misao” [“Thought”] in 1921, Stefanović, like Crnjanski, claims, first of all, that the common sense of the clear and intelligible had to surrender to the “higher logic” of “the obscure and unintelligible”. He goes on to suggest that, in place of Skerlić’s concepts of “healthy” and “sick”, the aesthetic categories of Dionysian and Apollonian, whose origin is connected with Nietzsche, should be introduced. “Only someone entirely lacking any sense of literature and art could ever have raised the question of health in art and literature”, says Stefanović, and claiming that “Apollonian” and “Dionysian” are connected with “subtle minds” goes on to add: “There is artistic creation arising out of a deep sense of harmony among things, harmony achieved and saturated, and there is artistic creation arising out of a sense of unachievable, eternally sought-after harmony; a more or less contemplative artistic creation, and a more or less dynamic artistic creation.” While the Apollonian principle of contemplative creation and harmony prevails in times of world and social peace, the turmoil, imbalance and ecstasy which the Dionysian principle presupposes belong to the times of great world and social crises. As opposed to the Apollonian principle, which characterises the poetry of Dučić and Rakić, Stefanović points out the Dionysian creation of Crnjanski and Stanislav Vinaver, who “destroyed the rules, freed the verse from fetters, stiffness and content-imposed limitations”.

Stefanović’s opting for the Dionysian principle is a deeply personal orientation of this poet, which developed into a consistently upheld aesthetic and poetic theory of his. This theory is articulated through the attitude towards sound and image, which, within the framework of lyrical poetic expression, manifest themselves as two more complex qualities: melody and imagination, and which, when it comes to aesthetic, categorial distinctions, belong to the two above-mentioned principles: Dionysian (sound) and Apollonian (image). Stefanovic develops his attitude towards sound and image building upon the intellect, whose important role in artistic, that is, poetic creation was also perceived by Crnjanski in the twenties. Stefanović wanted to reconcile the intellect with his basic creative religious-mystic orientation. This orientation basically coincided with the Dionysian principle, because it would admit of no restrictions. These Stefanović saw in Dučić, an Apollonian poet, whose striving for the infinite was restricted by his narcissism, attitude towards women and aestheticism. Within the framework of this aestheticism, according to Stefanović, Dučić was more restricted by images than by the symbolist sound. Stefanović, according to R. Konstantinović, “wanted universal sympathy in the spirit of Christianity”, the universalism of Christ. According to Stefanović, we can attain such universal, cosmic sympathy only through sound, not through image, which is restrictive. That is why “the absolute will not accept image”, says Stefanović.

Stefanović came to this conclusion having read the English poets Swinburne and Browning. He thought that they were superior to Gabriel Rosetti precisely because they overcame image by means of sound. Stefanović’s criticism of Rosetti, from the point of view of Swinburne and Browning, as Konstantinović observes, essentially boils down to criticism of Vojislavism (the poetic style of the Serbian poet Vojislav Ilić, translator’s note) and Parnassianism in Serbian culture – from the point of view of symbolism, the sort of symbolism that would be no mere resonance of words, that would transcend this resonance by means of the sound of the soul or universal thought and universal sympathy in motion. The importance of this criticism, however, is basically wider in scope, aesthetic, and it brings us back to Stefanović’s opposition to Skerlić’s non-aesthetic categories, from the point of view of the aesthetic categories of Dionysian and Apollonian. This opposition is of decisive importance for the theory of modern Serbian lyrical poetry, both at the time and later on, right down to the present day. What is more debatable, however, is Stefanović’s preference for the Dionysian, that is, his opting for sound, excluding image altogether. On the one hand, by opting for sound more universal than the symbolist sound, Stefanović undoubtedly contributed to the search for the essential melody of modern Serbian lyrical poetry, and even, in the final analysis, “the native tune”, of which more will be said later. On the other hand, it should not be forgotten that apart from sound, that is, melody, image is one of the essential elements of a lyrical poem. That is why the advent of the new in modern Serbian lyrical poetry was also heralded by means of image. Image achieves an aesthetic effect within the framework of elliptical poetic forms, as well as encompassing the entire range from impressionist to metaphysical lyrical poetry. Even avant-garde poetry, the poetry of surprise and revolt, which often shunned lyricism, occasionally offers unexpected, basically lyrical images. Such an image emerges through the broken form of the verses from the poem “Lasso around the Neck of the Mother of God” by Branko Ve Poljanski:

Fear not, hawks!
Your parabolic jumping under the burning tit of the world
will be beaks pecking
the bulging eyes of the dead hen
of the old culture.

Who goes there?
The new age.
What does it bring?
Hands without fingers.
True, mere stumps, but we’ve acquired a violin.

We wish to recreate the very melodious concerts
Of Italian angels from the fifteenth century:
Let the music be endlessly simple and dance simpler still –
Lullabies when they are a little funny.
Men with one leg and women with half a head
Will manage to follow the plough through the field
In greenish clothes, in reddish trousers,
After bluish ploughs, after dappled oxen through

Endless fields...

In this poem Rastko depicts the “society” of post-war poets whose “mechanical power” is damaged, who were crippled in the war – “Hands without fingers”, “With one leg” or “with half a head”. But “mechanical power” is no longer of importance for poets, so that “mechanical” damaged people, full of spiritual enthusiasm, now create a new harmony of colour and motion, that is, recreate old sounds in a modernist manner. For very good reasons, we may say that Rastko’s verses quoted above formulate a new poetics directed against the earlier aesthetic and l’art pour l’art poetics of Bogdan Popović. The new music is now much more connected to everyday life, it is “endlessly simple and dance simpler still”, and the lullabies are ordinary, “a little funny”. “The new ballet of damaged powers”, although the dancers will be “lame”, will be lovelier than “before, when we could not remember to dance”. The idyllic colours, formerly decorative, will descend from the heights of art for art’s sake into life, among farmers who follow “dappled oxen through / Endless fields”.

This very significant endorsement of the new in Serbian lyrical poetry after the First World War, which manifested itself in Svetislav Stefanović’s support of the aesthetic categories of Dionysian and Apollonian, opposing Skerlić’s categories of “healthy” and “sick”, neglected, as we have seen, poetic, lyrical image without justification. On the one hand, image itself underwent certain important changes, and on the other, it became an efficient means of pointing out the advent of the new both within the framework of modernism and within the framework of the avant-garde. As it transpired, from the very beginning of modern Serbian lyrical poetry interaction between sound and image, Dionysian and Apollonian, proved necessary, which is something that Nietzsche himself strove after. This interaction would occur with increasing frequency, to culminate in the lyrical poetry of Branko Miljković.

* * *

One new aesthetic category particularly marked the search for beautiful and harmony, not only in the initial phase of modern Serbian lyrical poetry, but throughout its course. It is the category of dynamic, whose explanation and future relevance are contained in the essay of Dimitrije Mitrinović entitled “The Case of Svetislav Stefanović” (1913). Mitrinović perceives two kinds of dynamics: the dynamics of Stefanović’s creative personality and the dynamics of his poetic and critical work. This text, however, is important not only for the creative profile of a writer but also for the understanding of the category of dynamic in general. On the one hand, according to Mitrinović, Stefanović’s personality “roars and breaks and strives upwards, rushes forward, is compact and expanding”. We may speak of the strength, “intensity”, firmness, boiling, foundations... of this personality. In a word, “we have in front of us a living man possessed of beliefs and passion, his pulse beats, willpower breaths”. Mitrinović discovers the strength of Stefanović’s creative personality in his health, willpower, morals, eroticism. Stefanovic’s expression is as if “chiselled in stone... full of power, heavy with meaning”. According to Mitrinović, in Stefanović’s style there are intuitive elements, painting and playing music, vividness of emotion, vision and evocation of vision. On the other hand, Stefanović’s discourse “in any case, has not found the word for its dynamics, a word whole and worthy of it”. “The phrases are there; the expression, however, is not entirely there: the words speak, but do not tell”. This discourse “when speaking... does not sing”. A poem is “singing”, whereas Stefanović’s skill is “writing”. What Mitrinović finds wrong with Stefanović’s poetry is its lack of soulfulness and surplus of philosophising – “being poisoned by intelligence”. He points out that this poetry lacks “tone”, and tone is the “unfathomable secret of beauty, supreme feature of poetry”. But then again, if Stefanović is not a poet who “filters spirit through the soul”, his expression is of critical bent, “filtering the soul through spirit”. Finally, Mitrinović says this of Svetislav Stefanović: “Even though he is not a poet, he will remain in the history of our literature and, in particular, our lyrical poetry as a person of importance who cannot be ignored and whose value is well known; together with the poet Jovan Dučić, this singing critic, forceful and informative, thoroughly cultured and coeval of us moderns, has laid the foundation of total, complete, integral poetry, which to us is a national necessity.”

Mitrinović’s essay “The Case of Svetislav Stefanović” serves as proof that the dynamics of spirit need not always be objectivised into the dynamics of poetic expression. As we have seen, what it takes to attain lyrical expression, according to Mitrinović, is to “filter spirit through the soul”, not the other way round. This, again, basically amounts to interaction between spirit and soul, emotions and intellect, whereby emotions are brought under control, but in such a way that they, that is, the human soul, have the last word, directly producing lyrical expression.

Boško Tokin also wrote of “dynamism” and the “dynamic” in his texts “The Expressionism of Yugoslavs” (1920) and “In the Atmosphere of Wonders” (1921). Tokin, first of all, points out dynamism as the feature distinguishing us from the rest of the world. Still, according to him, this dynamism, even though it is purely ours, “has something American about it”. According to Tokin, dynamism in general has a certain intensity characteristic of everything that is young, healthy and viable. It is a life-giving energy and flame. “Some of our predecessors had it, one might say, in an unprocessed form.” Yugoslav expressionism provides an aesthetic form of it. “Some of our predeces sors may have paved the way for us, which is all they could do” – concludes Tokin. Later on, in the text “In the Atmosphere of Wonders”, Tokin would add that, as well as expressionism, futurism and cubism “are, in fact, various forms of dynamism”, and that they presuppose “the recasting, resmelting, recutting and reboiling of old forms. Out of this reboiling and, at the same time, putting together anew, arises new value”. As we can see, Tokin points out the possibility that “some of our predecessors... may have paved the way” for the dynamism that would mark the development of modern Serbian lyrical poetry. However, he does not mention any of these “predecessors”. Sima Milutinović Sarajlija and Đura Jakšić are probably the most prominent among these. In both cases the dynamism is equally an expression of poetic temperament and a rebellion against the “disastrous state” of the world. These are, for the most part, the subjective, that is, psychological sources of dynamism. On the other hand, both the dynamism of poetic experience and the dynamism of poetic expression are closely connected with the dynamism of life, which became particularly prominent at the beginning of the 20th century, and was closely connected with the technical innovations aimed at faster communication among people.

In a sense, the category of dynamic is, axiologically speaking, primarily neutral. It all depends on its relationship with the poetic experience and specific means of poetic expression, that is, on its position within the structure of a lyrical poem. In Crnjanski’s poetry, for example, dynamism has more to do with the sensual and imaginative sphere of poetic experience than with the poetic form as such. Stream of consciousness and the character of poetic associations partially determined the zenithist, dadaist and surrealist dynamism as well. At the same time, however, the consequences of this dynamism in the latter cases were visibly reflected upon the poetic form itself – the verse rhythm. There is, also, in the case of Drainac, the predominant verse dynamism, which, together with the poet’s temperament, results in dynamic motion through space. In the case of Crnjanski, dynamism is in total harmony with the poetic melody. In fact, it is subordinate to that melody, so that it does not for one moment disrupt the overall harmony of a poem. In other cases (dadaism, zenithism, surrealism), dynamism is often not in conformity with the basic rhythm of a poem, and is deliberately turned against the linguistic melody. That is what Ranko Mladenović calls “dissection of ecstasy”; knowing that, to Crnjanski, “ecstasy” was the crowning achievement of lyrical poetic expression, this only serves to emphasise the role of dynamism. However, in the case of such a markedly anti-melodic function of dynamism, it can be in conformity with other elements of a lyrical poem – images, associations or humour. This is best evidenced by some poems of Branko Ve Poljanski and Dragan Aleksić. Dynamism is very closely linked to the vitalism of Rastko Petrović, carried to the height of “bodily ecstasy” – “pulse bursting”. In modern Serbian lyrical poetry after the Second World War, parallel with the quiet, subdued lyrical current (Stevan Raičković, Velimir Lukić), there flows the vitalistic-dynamic current of the lyrical poetry of Oskar Davičo, Ljubomir Simović or Boħidar Šujica. The occasional “feverishness” of Branko Miljković is also a form of lyrical dynamism, while the linguistic variant of dynamism is very much in evidence in the poetry of Branislav Petrović.

* * *

Boško Tokin, as we have seen, first linked dynamism with expressionism. The most thorough definition of expressionism in our essayistic literature is contained in Vinaver’s text “The Expressionist School Manifesto” (1920). In this text Vinaver not only defined the general framework and achievements of expressionism, but also essentially reconstructed the expressionist creative method. That is why we may assume that the poetic influence of this text was immense, not only on the emerging modern Serbian lyrical poetry but also on its later development, regardless of the fact that it has not been subjected to criticaltheoretical revaluation.

Starting his analysis with the claim: “we are all expressionists”, Vinaver concludes that reality is only a means and not the objective of the expressionist creative method. “The objective is creation, not the created”, says Vinaver. The created, in its turn, is the product of nature, whose logic and psychology must not satisfy us. From nature we take elements that we “shape into coupled thoughts, entwined emotions, linked worlds, the dynamism of spiritual being, which is realised through some organic concreteness”. What we are dealing with here, then, is “creating, not re-creating the world”, in total opposition to impressionists, who “almost never lived” in our literature, “being afraid... even of following nature”. According to Vinaver, impressionists linked “two absolutes”: the personal and its surroundings, but it was precisely due to this that they neglected “the spiritual essence of the surrounded” and “the essence of the surroundings”. In order to achieve the above-mentioned essence, it is necessary for impression to turn into expression. For expressionists take more from nature than it yields in a single impression, which is what impressionists are content with. This “more than” can be achieved by considering simultaneously the macro- and microlevel of an impression, that is, taking both the path of “cosmogonising” and the path of “atomising”.

According to Vinaver: when we cannot approach the infinite by means of the infinitely large, we approach it by means of the infinitely small. In doing so, we are not to take reality as a mere “reminder of something known”. “Reality is creative: it is achieved by means of conviction: we get convinced that it is real.” For this “conviction” to be as efficient as possible, it is necessary to get out of the deadening state of equilibrium, because expressionism starts from the premise that balance gets disrupted. What must be done, according to Vinaver, is overcome the “pining for equilibrium”. We must go towards chaos, but on the other hand, it is our duty to “forestall chaos”.

On the basis of Vinaver’s views quoted above, we can say that, by opposing equilibrium, expressionists rebel against the traditional concept of harmony as a preordained absolute equilibrium. Because of this, expressionism is also against the traditional concept of beauty: as we have seen, according to this view, harmony was inseparably linked to the supreme aesthetic category. This concept of beauty and harmony, as we have also seen, predominated in the aesthetic theory of Bogdan Popovic. Expressionists also introduce the above-mentioned dynamics, or dynamism, as a new, important principle of achieving harmony. This new harmony is a new absolute for expressionists – and compared to this absolute, Vinaver says, “our mistakes are only relative”. The path to new harmony, or new absolute, therefore, may include both “building” and “demolishing”; it presupposes the work of “an ever more organic logic” involving “mistakes, disharmony, unfeasibility, contrast and contradiction”. At the end of it is another “danger” – the possibility of dynamic perfection, “the hopelessness of a vicious circle whose perimeter contains the knowledge that all the chaos and harmony of creation are but chance music”.

In addition to the familiar conclusion of the expressionist poetics that all artistic events end in cosmos, the universe, Vinaver’s Manifesto points out some other elements important for modern art, as well as modern Serbian lyrical poetry: primitivism as a way of artistic subordination of nature, as metaphysics before it, in the course of which “it is not necessary to understand but to make our feelings capable of navigating the chaos of life”; liberation, which is more than freedom and which can be achieved completely only through abstract thought. It is liberation of art to be human only, liberation of words, concepts, notions from their vices and chains, “endless liberation of everything from everything”; intensification of both subjective and objective elements: intensification through imagination until a vision is attained, which is “always more intense than reality itself”; intensification of all positive or negative emotions, raising happiness, despair, doubt, fear... to a higher level; intensification of the characteristics of the real world – colours and shapes, also including elements of the fantastic.

We are particularly interested in finding out to what extent elements of Vinaver’s “Manifesto of the Expressionist School”, that is, expressionism in general, have been in evidence during the later development of modern Serbian lyrical poetry. We can approve of Vinaver’s starting from the opposing notions of expression and impression in his efforts to provide a definition of the expressionist poetics, because the two are the fundamental forms of poetic experience. It is, however, more difficult to accept Vinaver’s claim that impressionists “almost never lived” in our literature. Throughout the 19th century, our poetry was predominantly impressionistic, whereas neo-impressionism marks both the lyrical poetry of the moderna (the early Dučić), and the modernist-inclined lyrical poetry after the First World War (Crnjanski, Dedinac, V. Živojinović Massuka, some “lyrical cycles” of M. Nastasijević...). Neo-impressionism extends to the lyrical poetry between the great wars (D. Maksimović) and after the Second World War (T. Mladenović, S. Raičković, M. Danojlić, even some representatives of the rationalintellectual orientation – for example, B. Radović). In all these cases elements of impressionism are incorporated into a more complex poetic experience. This makes Vinaver’s claim about the alleged perfunctoriness of impressionism all the less credible. For, keenly experienced impression, reflected in perceptionalism, results in supreme lyrical quality, whereas prolonged or transformed impression may reach the sphere of lyrical transcendence, as in the case of Crnjanski’s etherism. After all, even Aristotle claimed that our spirit is primarily determined by impressions reaching us from without, crossing the borderline of the senses.

Concerning expressionism, one specific form of it is manifested in Crnjanski’s poetry. In quite a unique way, almost schematically, this poet delineated the development of expression from its emergence, deep in the semiconscious subjectivity, to its final objectivisation. The expressionism of Miloš Crnjanski, however, always strives to harmonise with his impressionism (“Again we let our form be influenced by the forms of cosmic shapes: clouds, flowers, rivers, brooks”, says Crnjanski in “The Explanation of ‘Sumatra’”). Thus the result of this impressionist- expressionist synthesis turns out to be a lyrical pantheism of sorts. At the very beginning of modern Serbian lyrical poetry there is the markedly expressionist figure of Dušan Vasiljev, who, by means of intensification, “paints” both nature and socially-coloured scenes from everyday life, and who, most of all, captures the consequences of the war through powerful expression. The experience contained in the poetry of Rastko Petrović is also more expressionist than impressionist in character. However, the presence of expressionism in modern Serbian lyrical poetry is more in the nature of sporadic occurrence than in the form of coherent style developed by some poets. Expressionism, for example, partially characterised the poetry of the zenithist Ljubomir Micić. Hints of expressionism in Nastasijević’s poetry (“A giant angel sounds his trumpet over the roofs”) are submerged in his consistent essentialism. Shades of expressionism are found in the poetry of some socially oriented poets (M. Banjević, J. Đonović, B. Čiplić), and it would be of interest to analyse the expressionist dimension of surrealism (for example, in the poetry of Moni de Buli or Aleksandar Vučo). As in the case of neo-impressionism, neo-romanticism or neo-symbolism, it is possible to speak of neo-expressionism in modern Serbian lyrical poetry after the Second World War. For example, the neo-expressionist experience of the war, or the expression of spiritual elevation, mesh with the lyrical vitalism of Ljubomir Simović. Neo-symbolism also marks the animalism- imbued archaic image of the world in the poetry of Vito Marković. The poetry of Vasko Popa developed from powerful metaphorical expressionism (in his collection Bark) to the neo-symbolist imaginative projection in later collections. The neo-expressionist orientation is also manifested in one of the lines of development of the poetry of Božidar Timotijević (the collection She-dragons). This orientation was, to a certain extent, also characteristic of the first collection of poems by Dragan Kolundžija, Prisoner in a Rose.

* * *

Characterised, generally speaking, by devotion to emotions and linguistic melody, the neo-romantic orientation in modern Serbian lyrical poetry is most often associated with the lyrical opus of Branko Radičević. The popularity of this poet was particularly in evidence in its early phase of development, and was reflected in the publication of The Branko Radičević Almanac (1924). Elements of neo-romanticism, however, can be found in the transitional period of the development towards modern lyrical poetry – in the work of Dis. All the later poets relying on Branko’s lyrical inspiration write their poems starting from the immediate emotional experience. But while the emotional order of the soul is clear in the case of Branko Radičević – in his poems we can identify pure emotions: joy, sorrow, pain, happiness, and trace the transformation of these emotions into melancholy as the established characteristic of his state of mind – the starting points of later poets, in terms of emotions, are more vague and complex. In the poetry of Dis, who may be considered the originator of neo-romanticism in modern Serbian lyrical poetry because he relies on certain romanticist motifs (the dead sweetheart, paradise lost), the still clearly defined emotions are submerged in dreams and visions directly connected with the real world caught in the process of “disintegration”. The emotions of Crnjanski and Milan Dedinac are characterised by a unique neo-romanticist elegiac tone, which, in the case of Crnjanski, tends towards a dispersive experience, whereas Dedinac keeps this tone at the same emotional level throughout. The neo-romanticism of Svetislav Stefanović is marked by a sentimental associativity within the framework of the world as a whole, while the lyrical poetry of Velimir Živojinović Massuka subtly brings the human (emotional) into harmony with romanticist nature, although this relationship is coloured by hints of subdued expressionism. Risto Ratković objectivises his essentially romanticist visions by means of automatic writing, while the neo-romanticist thought-imbued emotions in the poetry of Ranko Mladenović are projected into the cosmic sphere.

The links connecting modern Serbian post-World-War-Two lyrical poetry with this emotional context of lyrical poetry between the great wars are also, initially, neo-romanticist in character. With the passage of time, however, certain romanticist concepts such as nation, nature, soul, pain, infinity, cosmos, unity of the world, increasingly came to be connected with a number of new elements of lyrical structure. Within the framework of the so-called “Stražilovo line” of development, the lyrical poetry of Stevan Raičković establishes a marked continuity with the lyrical poetry of Miloš Crnjanski. The continuity is recognisable on the basis of the linguistic melody, but a detailed analysis reveals that the two poets differ when it comes to experience, world view and the meaning of a lyrical poem. One of them – Crnjanski – under the influence of Eastern philosophy, introduced gentleness, etherism and Sumatraism into modern Serbian neo-romanticist lyrical poetry, whereas the other – Raičković – enriched it by means of simplicity and silence. The elegiac neo-romanticist tone of Miloš Crnjanski and Milan Dedinac found itself a place in the context of the new, contemplative lyrical poetry of Božidar Timotijević.

A deeper layer of romanticism, which ranges from preservation of original emotions in their entirety to their very forceful transformation, colours the poetry of some important representatives of modern Serbian lyrical poetry originating after the Second World War. Davićo’s emotions pertaining to “life’s losses” and ideals, within the framework of his social-revolutionary lyrical poetry, achieve the effect of pure lyricism almost without any elements of reflection and imagination. The lyrical essence of folklore romanticism is built into the metaphysics of Miljković’s cycle “The Ruddy Sheldrake”. In one of its aspects, the lyrical poetry of Vito Marković evokes the period of early romanticism through emotions connected with balladic topics, following an archaic linguistic melody. The modern romanticism of the national spirit, combined with the idea of indestructibility of life, decisively determines the profile of the lyrical poetry of Ljubomir Simović. Within the framework of the lyrical transcendence of Alek Vukadinović, one may discern the glow of transformed concepts of archetypal romanticism – soul, pain, distance, infinity – firmly joined to a number of the poet’s universal personal symbols. The Rousseau-like idea of return to nature informs the emotions in the lyrical poetry of Milovan Danojlić. The connection between modern Serbian lyrical poetry and our folk lyrical poetry is also neo-romanticist in character. Within the framework of extended romanticism, for example, in the poetry of Milorad Petrović Seljančica, ready-made patterns of this type of lyrical poetry were taken over and incorporated into new poems; from the very beginnings of modern Serbian lyrical poetry, however, the principle of singing in the spirit of folk lyrical poetry became dominant. Penetrating to the very roots of this poetry, Rastko Petrović, in an authentic, modernist manner renewed some very old, “church-style” patterns of folk lyrical poetry, while Desimir Blagojević, with a very finely-attuned ear, searched for its musical patterns. After the Second World War, such inspiration marks the lyrical work of R. Petrov Nogo, and is occasionally manifested in the work of some other poets (for example, P. Bogdanović Ci).

* * *

In order to understand the neo-symbolist orientation in modern Serbian lyrical poetry, we must, first of all, consider symbolism – its characteristics and basic types, which preceded the neo-symbolist orientation. There exist the so-called “clear” Baudelaire-like type of symbolism, and the “vague” Mallarmé-like type. In the former case, the poet focuses on certain forms he singles out, striving to justify and emphasise them contextually, intellectually and emotionally, thus turning them into symbols. In the latter case, such forms are submerged in the currents of language, which is subjected to constant musicalisation. Elements of the “clear”, object-associated symbolism are in evidence in the work of our romantic poets – Đura Jakšić, for example, contextually “fortifies” a “rock” until, emotionally, pictorially and ethically established, it becomes a “clear” symbol. The same hold true in the case of the “bush” from the eponymous poem by Vojislav Ilić. Neo-symbolism generally strives to combine and reconcile the two kinds of symbolism mentioned above, or to bring them into harmony with other “isms”. Thus, in the work of some poets from the 1920’s (Svetislav Stefanović, Todor Manojlović, Risto Ratković) elements of the “clear”, objectassociated symbolism occur in connection with elements of neoromanticism. In the poetry of Rastko Petrović, characterised by vitalism and dynamism, there is no room for the symbolist-type condensation of expression, while Vinaver’s poetry tends towards the “vague”, musically- intoned symbolism. Traces of neo-symbolism, more “clear” than “vague” in their alogism, also occur in surrealist poetry (Moni de Buli, Aleksandar Vučo). The often-mentioned symbolism, that is, neosymbolism of Momčilo Nastasijević is more of an initial or incidental than lasting orientation of the poet. Certain religious symbols in his poetry are subordinated to his complex world view, which constantly strives for pure essences. The symbolist/neo-symbolist orientation was most conspicuously manifested in Dučić's poetry. While in the first phase of Dučić’s work, before the First World War, his symbolist orientation was determined by impressionism, in the period between the great wars the symbolic world of the poet shifts towards lyrical transcendence, and the final meaning of his religious symbols is dependent upon his metaphysics.

In modern Serbian lyrical poetry after the Second World War, the neo-symbolist orientation is also contextually determined in many ways. The cosmic forms or utilitarian objects-symbols in the poetry of Vasko Popa are arranged according to the comprehensive, mythical, imaginative-notional concept of the poet. Miljković’s folklore and esoteric symbols also produce lyrical effects dependent upon the poet’s imagination and linguistic melody, within the framework determined by the poet’s metaphysics. Velimir Lukić and Božidar Timotijević try to reconcile the object-associated and the musical variant of neo-symbolism, while the meaning of symbols in the poetry of Ljubomir Simović depends both on real life and a form of lyrical transcendence. Some concrete and abstract forms in the poetry of Alek Vukadinović (“house”, “circle”) are more archetypes or ideal essences than symbols. The real or unreal forms in the poetry of Dragan Kolundžija present themselves primarily within the framework of renewed, object-associated or “clear” symbolism, together with elements of avant-garde constructivism. The grotesque symbols of aggression in the poetry of Novica Tadić (“leer-orifice”) are determined more by emotional (psychological) than conceptual (spiritual) context.

* * *

Parallel with the spreading of the modern orientation in Serbian lyrical poetry, another, only seemingly controversial poetic orientation developed. This orientation is primitivism – a term which, and this is its first controversial designation, should be divested of the connotation of “backward” or “retrograde”, still present in contemporary lay opinion. In addition to this controversial aspect of primitivism, there is another apparent contradiction pertaining to it: how is it that amidst technological progress there appears something which requires looking backwards, and which may seem retrogressive historically speaking? There can be no misunderstanding, however, if primitivism is taken in its basic and only correct meaning – in the sense of return to the origins, the roots, time immemorial, directness, pristine purity. This orientation is based on, first of all, aesthetic, not some other, social or historical reasons. The social or historical aspects may be taken into consideration only inasmuch as they bring us back to a universal primeval layer of human nature. The aesthetic dimension of primitivism is manifested in a sense accurately observed by Svetislav Stefanović: beauty in art, particularly in poetry, was brought to its peak precisely at the beginning of the 20th century. The l’art pour l’art tendencies were felt the most at that time. Whatever reaches its peak, however, in accordance with the general trend in the history of ideas, carries a germ of negation within itself. Thus the symbolist-Parnassian linguistic-stylistic perfection of rhyming verse carried within itself germs of something new. This something, in the case of lyrical form, as we have seen, manifested itself as free verse. In the case of lyrical content, on the other hand, primitivist tendencies are one of the essential elements of innovation.

Primitivism should also be considered within the context of development of ideas in Europe during the 1920’s. Its emergence was particularly influenced by Lévy-Bruhl’s research into the primitive mentality as a constant of the human spirit, not only in the distant past but also throughout the later phases of its development. Striving for primitivism meant turning back from the peak that the human mind reached through scientific achievements, as well as the peak of creative consciousness reaching the utmost in terms of beauty of expression, and returning to the roots of everything that exists: the roots of the history of mankind, originating in its “golden age”, to the psychic roots of the human collective (the collective unconscious); the roots of nations and races, the roots of the individual (individual childhood), his/her chaotic, disturbed psyche and corporeality; the roots of the soil, the earth as the basis of the human world; finally, the roots of creativity, or the time of the original syncretism – the unity of dance, music and word.

The entire profile of primitivist inspiration found its place both in the poetics of modern Serbian lyrical poetry and in lyrical poetry itself. One of its first and most important manifestos – Crnjanski’s “The Explanation of ‘Sumatra’” – speaks of “original”, that is “racial” expressions. The text of the same author entitled “In Favour of Free Verse” points out that our literature needs to “serve” the cause of “nationalism” in a “tragic and magnificent epoch”; the categories of “original” and “racial” are equated again; the creation of new verse is directly connected with the tradition of Serbian folk poetry, and free verse is described as “that refined primitivism that occurs at the peak of development”. Finally, in a “primitivist” manner, Crnjanski maintains that lyrical poetry should be studied from the point of view of “dance, music, instruments that, to the present age, have always accompanied lyrical poems”. Vinaver, too, as we have seen, mentions “primitivism” in the “Manifesto of the Expressionist School”.

To a greater extent than Crnjanski and Vinaver, another modernistavant- garde Serbian poet strove for the primordial and original, heralded by the renewal of primitivism. He was Rastko Petrović, whose metapoetic and poetic texts realised a creative conception contrary to the l’art pour l’art perfectionism and triumph of beauty. Reaching for the roots of real life, its instinctive, uncultivated sphere – birth, blood and corporeality – the poetry of this poet was at the same time literary and unliterary, alternative, documentary. In Rastko’s poetry, the originality of life, starting from its very first moment – birth – was rendered in a veristic manner, with an element of brutality, which completely negated the preceding, primarily romanticist “finesse” of content. Rastko’s attitude towards the motif of corporeality was particularly contrary to the original romanticist treatment of this motif in the poetry of Branko Radičević, or the neo-romanticist etherising of the human figure in Miloš Crnjanski’s “Stražilovo”. Although in some respects this poet’s work is connected, in a neo-romanticist manner, to folk lyrical poetry and the evocation of the old Slavic culture, he primarily strove to overcome the boundaries of belles lettres and direct attention towards documentary, non-literary texts from real life, which, in his opinion, radiated poetry in a more primitive, therefore, original way than belles letters. This search for poetry outside literature, turning towards the primitivism of folklore lifestyle, including the amateurish creations of children and those of the clinically insane, represents invaluable creative and poetic experience on Rastko’s part, published on the pages of the literary magazine “Svedoćanstva” [“Testimony”]. This experience brought Rastko and the surrealists together (he later parted with them), because in the writings of the clinically insane he found ideal forms of automatism, “outside the boundaries of normality and common logic”:

Mary Magdalene rosaries they keep
tapeworm maggots rainworms creep
1868 charges in books in travels
for and for and, inventory for now
and now, for Mother of God
I am a female Serb, and a male Serb for now,
fat, lean, and to know a ruby,
and a female, egg, all over the globe, casuarius;
offers are to destroy January in winter
over the grave, over the crypt,
dress, and this water
a drop sprinkles you, puts out the flame;
skeleton, bones, who do you come from,
for simple, for decoration, female guards male.

If certain elements of the new, machine civilisation are present in the poetry of Rastko Petrović, as a consequence of futurist influences, the meaning of these elements still points to a negative attitude of the poet towards this civilisation. Contrary to these elements, the poet, as his text “The youth of a folk genius” shows, found in our “primitive” folk poems the models of “nursery rhymes” which “came into being in the moments of searching for a more direct kind of language”. Rastko Petrović insists on “the great likelihood of there being considerable parallels between the manner of creating primitive poems generally and the manner of creating those most spiritual, most civilised poems of ours”. This research points to a concept of great importance for our modern lyrical poetry – the native tune – which would be most thoroughly explicated by Momčilo Nastasijević. Nastasijević may be linked with primitivism in two ways. At the level of recognisable reality, in the poem “Words in Stone”, Nastasijević sought the “primitive” dregs of city life, wherein one may, at the same time, discern the presence of an archetypal model – Sodom and Gomorrah. On the other hand, Nastasijević’s penetration into the “root of things” unfolds in accordance with the mythical model of return to the absolute beginning. The formula of this mythical model, an essential influence on Nastasijević’s poetry, presupposes that nothing new can appear until the old, having reached its peak, falls apart completely. This peak presupposes the above-mentioned l’art pour l’artism, which demanded a renewal by way of “drinking” from the sources of life and folk creations. That is why the work of some poets deeply rooted in the patriarchal tradition – Janko Đonović and Mirko Banjević – despite occasional awkwardness of expression, considerably enriches modern Serbian lyrical poetry as a form of primitivism, opposed to the l’art pour l’artism of “light” topics. The immemorial ties linking man and the earth, expressed in an apparently anti-poetic but actually deeply lyrical language in the poetry of Bogdan Čiplić, represent a lasting contribution of primitivism to this lyrical poetry.

The neo-primitivist orientation in modern Serbian lyrical poetry after the Second World War is characteristic of Davićo’s revolutionary poetry, dominated by lyrically evoked instincts of life. The ethics of folk life, also based on instincts, is very much in evidence in the lyrical poetry of Ljubomir Simović. An ecstatic intoxication with life predominates in the poetry of Branislav Petrović. The anthropological-cosmological vision of the world in the poetry of Vito Marković derives from an essentially neo-primitivist vision. The homeland-based lyrical poetry of Milan Komnenić, apart from elements of the erotic and real, contains the neo-primitivist, archetypal model of “naked existence”. The neo-primitivist poetics of the “deprived” childhood and “bitter” fate of the people leaves its imprint in the work of certain poets tending towards meditative lyrical poetry (S. Rakitić). The complex dialectbased poetry of Matija Bećković also grew out of neo-primitivism, ranging from lyrical tragedy to lyrical humour.

* * *

The poetics of avant-garde movements – zenithism and dadaism – was not unrelated to primitivism either. This orientation is seemingly paradoxical, bearing in mind the radical inclination of these movements towards the new. However, it can be explained as a reaction against the pinnacle of beauty and form achieved, and a need for a return to the very beginnings. The zenithist variant of primitivism is linked to Micić’s concept of the barbarogenius, opposed to the “deliberate”, “cultured”, “refined” primitivism of Western Europe. The Balkan primitivism, on the contrary, is “unconscious”, “naive” and, therefore, primordial. It is original and, as such, different from everything that is deformed, so that this contradiction in the poetics of zenithism takes precedence over the contrast of old versus new. On the other hand, according to Dragan Aleksić, “dadaism is a primitivist second-abstract, negating everything that belongs to tradition”. Primitivism is based on “nerves”, which are “primordial, uncorrupted, unselfconsciously strong”; “nerves are primitivism, and sensation arises when the body receives, and is on the road to cogitation”.

If we wish to determine the place of zenithism and dadaism in the context of modern Serbian lyrical poetry, we must start from the fundamental poetic principles of these “literary twins”. What they have in common is anti-mimetism. In the poetics of zenithism, anti-mimetism, first of all, implies the renunciation of tradition – from the Greek ideal of beauty to the l’art pour l’art concept. In the realm of experience, antimimetism presupposes an associative creative approach. The origin of the associative train of thought is the primitive way of thinking, lacking psychology and logic. The aim is to produce associations as disparate, and therefore, as strange as possible. This leads to paradoxes closely related to the process of estrangement, introduced by the Russian formalists. In the sphere of expression, form, zenithists strive for a “liberated” poetic word. This “liberation” leads to an emphasis placed on the spatial dimension (Micić’s “words in space”), that is, the plastic dimension of words – a new form of “optoplastics”. As all new art, zenithism is most closely connected to science. For the zenithists, the paradox does not imply a lack of sense but a “legibility of the spirit, its plastic character”. But the meaning of new art, as well as the zenithist poetry, is not discovered through reason but through intuition, which is the fundamental element of cognition and creative force.

Contrary to the zenithism of Micić and Branko Ve Poljanski, dadaists, according to Dragan Aleksić, link the beginning of the associative train of thought to that space between sensation and cognition, which should not be equated with nerves, lacks conscious cognition altogether, and is “unselfconsciously strong”. In place of reflection of reality, they insist on a symptomatic expression of this reality (“everything is a symptom”). Instead of the past or the future, we focus on moments – “minutes, seconds” – presupposing that every second is news. Dadaists, too, oppose the role of reason; every second brings wonder, closely related to the zenithist paradoxes. The dadaist concept of abstraction is very interesting and far-reaching but without sufficient justification; to dadaists, it boils down to “clangour, rushing, shouting, banging, racket, advertising, as abstract designations for a whole complex of conglomerates”. To dadaists, in the spirit of Nietzsche’s teaching, abstraction is “excessive tension and willpower”. Striving for a “second-expression of non-allusiveness” (“cover up, symbolists”), maintaining that “a spread of abstraction substitutes for a handful of comparisons”, and referring, with that in mind, to Kurt Schwitters, Dragan Aleksić, just like zenithists, aims for independence of the word, its desemantisation. But this effort points to the fruitful need for condensation and precision of poetic expression. The zenithist and dadaist associative method is characterised by marked spontaneity of expression, which resulted in some interesting poetic creations. These could also have been due to reliance on constructivism, that is, simultaneism in the way of innovation.

From the point of view of this Anthology, however, the contribution of zenithists and dadaists to modern Sebian lyrical poetry is, on the whole, not particularly significant. The opposition to all traditions and “academisms”, as well as the opposition to the futurist, expressionist and surrealist concepts of artistic sign, gradually expanded into opposition to the modernist or expressionist emotional categories of pathos and sentimentality. On the other hand, in the case of zenithism, the insistence on contrasting pain and laughter, sadness and joy, also on tragic or comic as “an alternation of our heart”, on “martyrdom”, tears or laughter, since “there is no art without martyrdom”, only produced lasting results, leaving an imprint on the beginnings of modern Serbian lyrical poetry, in the work of Branko Ve Poljanski. Micić’s poems are based on an essentially verbal construction, fired by a sense of revolt, so that only occasional lyrical fragments in the spirit of expressionism, against which he rebelled, may be found in them. The dadaist contribution of Dragan Aleksić to modern Serbian lyrical poetry should not be overlooked; it is manifested in unusual associations, as well as humour, but also in some later successful attempts at renewal of the classical patterns of Serbian lyricism and articulation of original, Balkan topics.

* * *

In the first issue of the magazine “Svedoćanstva” (1924) Marko Ristić says this of surrealism: “It will suffice merely to point out what a largescale return to romanticism this is, with all the liberated forces of imagination and pure inspiration.” There follows: “Surrealism does not want to remain within the boundaries of poetry, and its use in action, its manifestations outside literature, appear to be most interesting. Puns, scientific inventions, prophecies, research into the psyche, odd coincidences, ‘instinctive ideas on fashion, on politics’, inundating reality with dreams, many behavioural gestures in life, may, due to the character of their origin, be considered to belong to the archives of surrealism. ‘The Bureau of Surrealist Investigations’ has been established with a view to gathering for these archives as many reports pertaining to the unconscious working of the spirit and as much experimental data from all spheres of activity as possible, for a purpose which cannot be discerned as yet.” If we disregard the claim that surrealism is “a large-scale return to romanticism”, which is almost entirely groundless and will be discussed later, these first reminiscences on Ristic’s part do point out certain characteristics which may be considered essential for this poetic movement. The surrealist focus on areas “outside literature”, research into the psyche which presupposes reliance upon the unconscious, instincts and dreams, links with scientific inventions and politics, puns and “behavioural gestures in life” do belong to “the archives of surrealism”.

The declaration entitled “The Position of Surrealism” (1930), which is otherwise not articulate enough, signed by Vučo, Dedinac, Davičo, D. Matić, M. Ristić and others, adds concreteness, transcendence, dynamism, morality, dialectics, revolt, destruction and humour. If we expand this list by adding “automatic writing”, as the fundamental form of the surrealist creative method, the “inventory” of the surrealist “archives” appears to be complete. The question of particular importance to us: what the contribution of surrealism to modern Serbian lyrical poetry is, is closely connected with the above-mentioned Ristić’s claim that surrealism represents “a large-scale return to romanticism”. The entirely justified negation of this claim relies upon a fact pointed out in Rastko Petrović’s text entitled “Living Creation and Immediate Data of the Subconscious”. In this text Rastko maintains that “... another surrealist fallacy is that in the process of recording the currents of the subconscious they entirely limited themselves to the fermentation of ideas, thus forgetting that fermentation of emotions represents the deepest level of the life of the individual”. If it is clear that opting for “ideas” instead of “emotions” distinguishes surrealists from both romanticism and lyrical poetry, that is, lyricism, Rastko’s claim quoted above presupposes some other important facts. It is, first of all, in accordance with Rastko’s emphasis on the decisive role of consciousness in a poetic creative act, whose form and “disordered life of the subconscious” are like a “possible decadence of former intellectual preoccupations”. According to Rastko, it is of particular importance that ideas “are fed and regulated... by... emotions only”. By emphasising the decisive role of emotions rather than ideas, Rastko Petrovic evidently, contrary to surrealists, manifests genuine devotion to the principle of lyrical creation, presupposing the necessary Hegelian control of emotions in the process of creation by ideas.

“Fermentation of ideas”, not “fermentation of emotions”, as the basic principle of surrealist poetics, which stresses the greater role of poetry in general, as opposed to lyrical poetry, resulted in the break with surrealism on the part of several poets who nominally belonged to this movement, participating in all its public manifestations. This is most conspicuous in the cases of Milan Dedinac and Oskar Davičo. The former tried to reconcile his pure lyricism perhaps more with the dadaist spontaneity than with the surrealist automatism (we presuppose that the distinction between spontaneity and automatism has to do with the greater part played by consciousness in the case of the former). At the same time, however, within the framework of his surrealist orientation this poet managed to colour some purely surrealist images with lyricism:

Two bullets passed through my chest
where a penguin sleeps on a reef above water.

(“St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre”)

Having created several authentic surrealist poems (such as “Advertisement”), Davičo, within the framework of his basic socialrevolutionary lyrical orientation, started using the language of universal lyrical spontaneity. On the other hand, lack of emotion fundamentally endangered the poetry of Marko Ristić, so that its currents, normally controlled by consciousness to a greater extent, with rare exceptions appear to be cold, without a minimum of poetic fire. The purely surrealist poetics was manifested to the greatest degree in the poetry of Moni de Buli and Aleksandar Vučo. They both insist, at the same time, on spontaneity, that is, automatism, unusual associations and humour. The combination of the dadaist spontaneity and surrealist automatism, including frequent puns, is discreetly coloured by humour in the poetry of Moni de Buli, whereas the poetry of Aleksandar Vučo, by means of unusual associations, produces the effect of an “inverted” world, based not only on word-play but exhibiting the characteristics of a coherent linguistic-semantic poetic world thoroughly imbued with a lyrical kind of humour. We describe his humour as lyrical because the scenes from this world are characterised by mellowness and subdued contemplation which have the effect of diminishing their absurdity, whereas linguistic “disturbances” are “retouched” by means of lyrical images. Vučo’s achievement in this respect is a veritable feat of poetic creation, which significantly marked one branch of modern Serbian lyrical poetry.

As opposed to the spontaneity of lyrical, life-originating inspiration, which was particularly in evidence in the period immediately after the Second World War, Davičo later opted for a poetry characterised by a purely linguistic type of spontaneity, which is connected to the semantic level by ideas that are often rather vague, and is, therefore, outside the sphere of lyrical poetry. The work of Dušan Matić represents a special segment of surrealist poetry: on the one hand, Matić so much insisted on the “fermentation of ideas” that he may be considered the originator of Serbian intellectual poetry as a whole. On the other hand, Matić’s poetry often produces an image of the world imbued with etherism. This etherism, however, lacks lyricism, which was characteristic of the diaphanous poetic world of Miloš Crnjanski. The reasons for this probably have to do with Matić’s relativism, his basic intellectual and philosophical orientation. Still, in the work of this poet we can find authentic poetic writings, a synthesis of automatism and controlled spontaneity, irony and lyrical gentleness, real-life inspiration and intellectual construction. In the poetry of Ljubiša Jocić we also come across lyrical fragments containing a successful combination of automatic writing and the logic of the poem.

Elements of surrealist poetics – automatic writing, the role of the subconscious and unusual associations – are found in modern Serbian lyrical poetry after the Second World War, but in a fragmentary sort of way, together with elements of some other poetics. Within the framework of Miljković’s metaphysical lyrical poetry, we can note occasional unusual combinations of ideas and objects, as well as images and metaphors deviating from the real world order. Surreal images crop up from time to time in the work of Dragan Kolundžija, while the surrealist- style automatic writing, including certain alogical perspectives of space, represents one of the basic rhythmic components of the lyrical poetry of Božidar Šujica. The poetry of Dragan Jovanović Danilov, evaluated from the point of view of its implied potential, also experiments with the effects of what is basically surrealist-style automatic writing.

* * *

There exists a categorial whole, composed of several concepts, which may be said to have influenced significantly the essence and direction of the development of modern Serbian lyrical poetry. The categories in question are: ethnological, folklore, religious, mythical, and the central notion, unifying all of these, is the notion of people (ethnos). In this case as well, the above-mentioned categories are somewhat contra dictory in relation to the term modern, which, pertaining to the life of people in the 20th century, primarily implies the blossoming of technical civilisation, whereas the terms in question, pertaining to the syntagm folk life, presuppose something primordial or archaic. However, while discussing primitivism, we noted that during the rise of artistic creation, at the time of artificiality and l’art pour l’artism, modern Serbian lyrical poetry turned to the roots of the human being and human community. All these notions, therefore, may be considered integral parts of the primitivist orientation in general. They presuppose the life of the people, including its everyday existence and customs, as well as folk creations, that is, oral literature; also, at a higher, further removed level, religious consciousness and collective creations, that is myths, which involve beliefs and nature, and which, since the time of the separation of certain groups from the community of mankind as a whole, have been linked to particular races and peoples.

In a nutshell, the beginnings of modern Serbian lyrical poetry are marked by an awareness of the great romanticist affirmation of nations and national creations, already a thing of the past, which the so-called written literature was directly linked to. This awareness presupposed not taking over the existing patterns of folk poetry but attaining, in a more general, indirect fashion, the essence of these concepts, ranging from common customs to the “neutrality” of myth. “There is no more singing along to folk tunes” – was the radical statement of Dimitrije Mitrinović on the eve of the First World War; he was inspired by modern European theories that Svetislav Stefanović had been introducing into our cultural milieu. Mitrinović himself, however, insisted on the universal dimension of the ethnic originality of our literature: “We need those who will be able to say a word in general literature concerning mankind: it should, however, be our word, about mankind inside us.”

We have already pointed out some forms of the link between modern Serbian lyrical poetry and folk lyrical poetry. Bearing the above-mentioned notions in mind, we draw the reader’s attention to Rastko’s interest in the life of a black African race and Crnjanski’s ironic attitude towards the national myth – in the “Vidovdan (St. Vitus’ Day, anniversary of the battle of Kosovo, translator’s note) poems”. (It should be pointed out straight away that the irony in question is of the romanticist, lyrical kind, not intellectual.) It should also be pointed out that Nastasijević’s poetry cannot be understood outside the categories of pagan, Christian and patriarchal. Since the Second World War the ethnic, folklore, religious and mythical inspiration in modern Serbian lyrical poetry has grown in intensity. This inspiration in the poetry of V. Popa, M. Pavlović, I. Lalić, B. Radović, B. Miljković, Lj. Simović, A. Vukadinović, D. Kolundžija, M. Bećković, P. Cvetković, M. Tešić and P. Bogdanović, has comprised, apart from the customs, mentality and beliefs of the Serbian people, the wider sphere of the Balkan mythology, starting from the prehistoric period, through the worlds of the ancient Egypt and antiquity, Byzantium, all the way to the modern age.

* * *

The national-collectivist inspiration in modern Serbian lyrical poetry is inseparable from a notion without which we cannot achieve an insight into the essence of this poetry. It is the notion of “the native tune”, discussed in a revelatory fashion by Momćilo Nastasijević in an essay published in 1929. The very title of the essay, “For the Native Tune”, points to the poet’s dedication to a new poetic principle which, in his opinion, can and should direct the currents of lyrical, poetic and musical creation in these parts. The essay is also important because in it the poet starts from his most important philosophical, aesthetic and poetic views. These views originate from a philosophy of life whose basic principle points to the world as a single, indivisible whole. For Nastasijevic, the principle of holism is of primary importance in the living world – the spirit – and, therefore, in the material world. In accordance with this principle, “art is one” in the same way that “God is one” and “life is one”. According to Nastasijević, music forms the basis of all arts, and the basic principle of the unity of art and life is a musical principle: singability. This God-given principle, Dionysian in character, originated from the very “roots” of the world. On the way towards melodic articulation “singability” expands to include speech, and in the general agitation of the spirit, “words only delineate in the mind this flicker already transmitted from spirit to spirit”. Words in poetry are somewhere “midway between speech and a musical melody”, for poetry is “by several degrees more singable than speech”. And the fact that, to Nastasijević, “voice is more important by far than words” (“Not a poet but a singer”) testifies to his dedication to the lyrical as a special kind of poetry.

The melodic line, or the line of “singability”, turns into a native tune depending on its inclusion in specific national groups of mankind. If a native tune is “deep-rooted” and a “living expression of the spirit”, then its basic national variant is not in any way limiting to it. For, according to Nastasijevic, “the universally human in art is, through its blossom, as much above the national as its roots are below the national”. The “root” of the native tune reaches to the unconscious, or more precisely, to the collective unconscious; Nastasijević himself did not use this term from Jungian analytical, that is, deep psychology, but obviously inclined towards it maintaining that we are “least conscious” of the “native” tune, and that it is “deep-rooted and collective”. The 1920’s were the years of the rise of Jungian analytical psychology, so that a connection may be established between Nastasijević’s scheme of the native tune and Jungian scheme of archetypes, arising out of the collective unconscious, although Nastasijević never expressly referred to Jung. As early as 1916, however, he wrote in his Grey Notebook I: “There exist things indirectly natural and directly natural: the former were created by consciousness and the intellect, the latter by the unconscious. – The conscious is the creation of the unconscious.” In the same way that, according to Jung, in the collective unconscious there exist archetypes in themselves, which manifest themselves in the individual unconscious and consciousness as archetypal patterns or archetypal notions, Nastasijević’s native tune exists in the manner of a melodic “reservoir” in our national, unconscious collectivity, emerging through particular melodic patterns in the minds of our individual artists. As an example of native melody in our spoken language, Nastasijević offers the following statement, spoken in an ordinary tone of voice: “Majka te némala” [“Wish your mother were to lose you”]. Maintaining that the melody should “by no means” be “confused” with the “objective sounds of the words”, Nastasijević obviously echoes Crnjanski’s plea for the “iamb and trochee of the soul” in place of the “iamb and trochee of grammar”. From the point of view of our modern lyrical poetry, some important points in connection with Nastasijević’s concept of the native tune need to be underlined. To begin with, we must bear in mind the complexity and dynamic character of this concept. Also, according to Nastasijević, as “there are no fixed melodies in our folk singing but as many variants as there are singers”, and “we should not look for this or that separate piece of work but the same manner of making waves amid this cornucopia of motifs”, in the poetry of modern Serbian lyrical poets, we should start from some general forms of making waves, derived from the collective unconscious, and focus on the individual contribution of each of these lyrical poets to the process of making waves. Only through this continuing dynamics of the relationship between the collective and the individual can the essence of our native tune be manifested. Owing to its collective nature, our folk poetry, whose great rhythmic-melodic significance for our written poetry was perceived by Crnjanski and Vinaver, is closest to this native tune. In addition to this, our native tune includes some earlier poetic patterns that are often renewed, as a specific form of citation, in the lyrical poetry of modern poets. Finally, every lyrical poet of note possessed of an ear for our native tune contributes his own individual melodic variant to the wave-making derived from the collective unconscious. That is why all the patterns of the native tune, collective or individual, original or renewed, from the minor forms of oral literature, lyrical and epic folk poetry, the poetry of Sima Milutinović Sarajlija, Branko Radičević, Đorđe Marković Koder, Laza Kostić... to the lyrical poetry of Milan Dedinac, Dragan Aleksić, Desimir Blagojević, Momčilo Nastasijević, Stanislav Vinaver, Dušan Matić, Oskar Davičo, Branko Miljković, Vito Marković, Ljubomir Simović, Milosav Tešić... should be the subject of an integral critical-theoretical approach.

* * *

Among the new forms of lyricism or the lyrical as an aesthetic category, which appeared in modern Serbian lyrical poetry immediately after the First World War, and have been in evidence throughout its later development, lyrical transcendence and lyrical abstraction stand out in particular. In the case of the former, we deal with the transcendence of concrete phenomenality, from its partial transformation to its complete transcendence of the real world, or the substitution of the worldly by the other-worldly, the earthly by the unearthly, the material by the immaterial, the sensual by the spiritual. This transcendence has both a secular and spiritual, religious-eschatological dimension. In itself, lyrical transcendence is not a priori a positive evaluative category, because lyrical poetry can equally successfully be created on all levels and in all the spheres of the subjective-objective world view. The fact is, however, that this concept leads us into a new sphere, removed from that of everyday reality, and that lyrical transcendence is most often attained after a coherent world view has been formed in the work of individual lyrical poets. The etherism of Miloš Crnjanski may be considered the first form of lyrical transcendence in modern Serbian lyrical poetry. This transcendence is characterised by the ascending movement of lyrical purification towards transparent air that makes it possible for material objects, first of all, outsize human figures, to float. Speaking of the painters Miloš Golubović and Petar Dobrović, Crnjanski has in mind expressionism as an attempt at “rising above matter”, which points to the cosmic dimension as one of the basic perspectives of lyrical transcendence. This cosmic perspective is the initial form of such transcendence, because within its framework we can still recognise elements of material phenomenality. It provides a guideline to the “astral lyricism” of Todor Manojlović, the “baroque lyricism” of Anica Savić Rebac and the lyrical-ironic inspiration of Ranko Mladenović and Dragutin Kostić. The classicist-baroque stylisation of the cosmic expanse in the lyrical poetry of Anica Savić Rebac is particularly impressive. In the period after the Second World War the cosmic perspective is connected with the metaphysical lyrical poetry of Branko Miljković, the mythological- symbolic lyrical system of Vasko Popa, the archaic world view of Vito Marković, the lyrical scientism of Miroljub Todorović...

Dedication to lyrical transcendence is occasionally manifested in the poetic form itself. Some verses often define the sphere of lyrical transcendence more effectively than metapoetic language and impose themselves as the basic principles of the poet’s poetics. We find such verses in the poem of Stanislav Vinaver beginning “O poem of mine, you change unchanging...”:

O poem of mine, you change unchanging,
.......................................
Go straight, stray not into a foreign land.
Pain, joy, all beyond psyche’s amplitude.
Poem divine: essences’ saraband
Through deeps where distant nebulae expand,
The silent abyss of infinitude.

“Pain, joy, all beyond psyche’s amplitude” – this verse offers an example of transcending one’s subjective limitations that may lead into panpsychic objective spheres, but may also mean a final disappearance into endless cosmic space. Having densely “packed” the sphere “beyond psyche’s amplitude” with meaning which is most effectively harmonised with its sound (“Memory of meaning, all resounding”), Vinaver approached the ideal of pure transcendence and lyrical abstraction.

Dučić’s poem “Inscription” (1932), the most striking example of his lyrical transcendence, sublimates his whole poetic experience: the impressionist experience of landscape, now freed from description; the Parnassian experience of perfection of form, now sacrificed for the sake of perfection of shape; the symbolist experience of reflection and resonance, which gave way to silence and the language of essential ambiguity. In accordance with Valéry’s “Mediterranean” aesthetics and poetics of ascending towards the cosmic light amidst a seascape, this poem is one of the most impressive manifestations of lyrical transcendence in modern Serbian lyrical poetry:

From the vast black slab of the sea,
Where all calm suns come to rest,
To death’s hillside, where one can see
Throughout this world and the next –

Above abysses they all shine
With heavenly clarity...
Where all paths to their end decline
Betwixt dream and reality.

Climb oh so softly, ivy, do,
Up the white marble so steep,
So nothing can bestir anew
The ash of fatigue and sleep.

Apart from this form of lyrical transcendence, which, in the final analysis, proves synonymous with eternity, in Dučić’s late lyrical poetry there exist two more forms of transcendence: eschatological, marked by the absolutisation of death, and religious, marked by the absolutisation of God.

Although, at first glance, it is connected solely with the immanence (“the root” of being), Nastasijević’s poetry at the same time reaches the sphere of transcendence in a number of ways. In his poetry, along with the worldly one continually discerns the otherworldly, the image of God connects the heavenly and the earthly, unconsummated earthly passion emanates from beyond the grave and restless souls connect the spheres of life and death. Nastasijević links immanence to transcendence, establishing the mythical circle of return to the absolute beginning, thus strictly determining the boundaries of his complex lyrical world.

Declaring his “loyalty to the forces that are behind the wall”, Branko Miljković in “The Angel of Arilje” also establishes links with transcendence in a number of ways. All the negative attributes of being – “empty”, “unreal”, “absent”, in the sum total of his metaphysical lyrical poetry take on a positive sign: the “unreal” is more real than the “real”, the “empty” is deeper than the “full”, “absence” is more convincing than “presence”. This Pascal-like “void”, transcending the “full”, visible material phenomenality, is not imposed as a pure formula of philosophic transcendence, but is organically linked to the lyrical structure of the poem, thus presenting itself as the most impressive example of metaphysical lyrical poetry in Serbian poetry after the Second World War. If the two most prominent names in this branch of lyrical poetry in the preceding period were, without any doubt whatsoever, those of Njegoš and Dučić, it does not mean that the effort of a less known poet – Nenad Mitrov – to experience the fundamental metaphysical notions: a priori, “thing in itself”, Nothing, should remain unmentioned. Sensing the relevance of the notion of Nothing, which would be increasing steadily following the advent of Heidegger’s philosophy, Mitrov opposes the supreme power of this ontological concept by means of the “soul”, as the powerful and eternal lyrical principle. The metaphysical lyrical poet Siniša Kordić at the very beginning of modern Serbian lyrical poetry also found in philosophical transcendence a concept which would later greatly occupy the attention of our and foreign poets. It is the notion of “things”, which, according to this poet, are the essential determinants of our inner world.

Certain forms of religious, Christian transcendence in the lyrical poetry of Ljubomir Simović, visions, ascension and resurrection, are the consequence of dramatic real-life events and wartime conflicts, brought to the highest level of the tragic, transcending the boundaries of the real.

Alek Vukadinović is also among those who occasionally express their dedication to lyrical transcendence in verses like “The blue of my frost / stripped of life”, or “Future, o purity / Whereto stars are my guide, / Ah, this sun above life / And pure sapphire dreamtide”. Reducing the sensuousness and materiality of certain concrete forms (“house”, “guest”)... revealing their ideal essence, and adding to this essence the immateriality of notions like “God”, “circle”, “evil”, which do not lose their influence in the material world, Vukadinović provided a superstructure to all his lyrical poetry in the form of a layer of lyrical transcendence.

Lyrical abstraction is very closely connected with lyrical transcendence. Speaking of the “native tune”, Nastasijević says that the affective “wave-making” eventually spreads to encompass “mathematical abstraction”. However, “mathematical abstraction” reaches its “singability” level only if the native tune “arises out of the deepest layers of the spirit”. If Nastasijević reached the “roots of things”, revealing their essence, his lyrical abstraction in the poems “Deafness” and “Words in Stone” is both object-associated and linguistic (melodic). Vinaver went along another route. Starting from language, that is, the linguistic melody, he “raised” the meaning to the level of this melody, finding in their union the central line of his lyrical abstraction. The poetry of Desimir Blagojević, in view of its starting point, is also closer to sound than meaning. This sound is most often within the currents of the authentic native tune, but sometimes, in its abstraction, removed from the supreme meaning of the poem. Alek Vukadinović also strives for lyrical abstraction, both in the object-associated and sound sphere of his poetry. Some of Vukadinović’s abstract symbols (“house grains”, “Mouth of fear”) are caught in the currents of the collective and individual native tune – minor forms of oral literature and broken vocabulary – and lyrical abstraction, as a result of this coupling, continually tries to harmonise the sound and the meaning.

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Modern Serbian lyrical poetry after the Second World War can hardly be viewed as a whole if we do not take into consideration the aesthetic categories of emotional and rational, that is, intellectual, or the genre forms based upon these categories: emotional (lyrical) poetry and rational-intellectual poetry. If we are interested in lyrical poetry only, we shall inevitably come across links between lyrical and rational-intellectual poetry, for in the sphere of subjective spirituality as a whole emotions and reason, that is, intellect, inevitably intersect. We should point out immediately that we do not use the terms reason and intellect in either a scholastic or a Kantian sense. Namely, reason (ratio) is the basic judgmental and cognitive faculty of the spirit, whereas “intellect”, directly derived from the Latin word intellectus and fully accepted in 20th-century usage, implies a more complex and far-reaching spiritual power of judgement and cognition.

Reason and intellect have visibly imposed themselves in modern Serbian poetry only after the Second World War. This prominent role of the two categories of the spirit is the consequence of Man’s eminently rational bent throughout the 20th century. Narrowing our view of poetry somewhat, rational and intellectual may be understood as the necessary controlling elements of emotions, in accordance with the Hegelian principle of “freeing not from emotions but in emotion”. However, while Hegel perceived this “freeing” solely “within” the “emotion” itself, not as a controlling element imposed from without, a rather conspicuous rift, contrary to this principle, occurred in the poetry of the 20th century. On the pretext of avoiding lyrical sentimentality originating from emotions, reason appears as the sole creative power of the spirit in a great deal of this poetry. That is why it is necessary to distinguish between lyrical poetry, which, originating from emotions, also relies on reflection, closely related to reason and intellect in the nature of things, and rational, that is, intellectual poetry, which, in its extreme forms, excludes emotions altogether.

The insistence upon reason and intellect in modern Serbian poetry has proved justified since the Second World War on account of a really long tradition of sentimental lyrical poetry, and for the purpose of establishing connections with European poetry, where this intellectual orientation was manifested a lot earlier. This insistence, however, has led to certain forms of poetic exclusiveness which lyrical poetry neither could follow nor was it willing to do so.

If our approach to modern Serbian lyrical poetry is aesthetically oriented, then we can try to explain this rift by means of Kant’s distinction between aesthetic judgements and cognitive judgements. While the aesthetic judgement focuses on the subject (Kant does not recognise the existence of beauty as an object or objective idea but gives priority to our feelings in connection with beauty), the cognitive judgement focuses solely upon the object. That is why in the case of aesthetic judgement the emotional component is essential, while the cognitive judgement is characterised by pure rationality. These are the reasons for the rift between lyrical and rational-intellectual poetry. If lyrical poetry, relying on emotional experience, is based upon direct intuitive insight into the object, rational-intellectual poetry derives solely from insight into the object, lacking any emotional component whatsoever. Direct emotional experience of the object, as a purely spiritual poetic act, does require a spiritual foothold. That is why Nastasijevic insisted on “experiencecognition”, as a synthesis of the psychological and spiritual component. In lyrical poetry such a foothold is predominantly found in the abovementioned reflection, which, together with emotions, brings about meditation, but which functions jointly with emotions even when it has a metaphysical bent. On the other hand, pure cognition in rationalintellectual poetry may be superficial (rational) or profound (intellectual), but there is a danger of poetry taking over the role of prose in such cases, thus finding itself not only outside the sphere of the lyrical but outside the sphere of the poetic as aesthetic categories.

Concerning some poets who wrote in the period following the Second World War, whose poetry is predominantly characterised by direct emotional experience of the object, we have already discussed their work while dealing with specific literary movements and aesthetic categories. We shall now deal with some other poets belonging to this orientation and this period. We have in mind Desanka Maksimović’s impressionist lyrical poetry, spanning a long period of time, enriched with spiritual premonitions and reflexive responses; Tanasije Mladenović’s intimist-meditative lyrical poetry; Slobodan Marković’s lyrical poetry of spiritual zest and liberated existence; Svetislav Mandić’s lyrical poetry and its elegiac, “Stražilovo”-like tone; Rajko Sjekloća’s lyrical poetry, with its unity of nature and the world of man; Aleksandar Petrov’s “Slavic lyricism” within the framework of dramatic historical events; Slobodan Rakitić’s meditative lyrical poetry and its universal themes; Milan Komnenić’s urban spleen, as a rare thematic unit, subjected to lyrical irony; Dragomir Brajković’s homeland-inspired poetry, with its poignant social moments; Radomir Andrić’s lyricism of folk life; Novica Tadić’s lyrically-shaded grotesque and fantastic world; Milosav Tešić’s lyrical poetry, with its ethno-geographic dimension; Predrag Bogdanović Ci’s thoroughly individual lyrical experience of mythical themes.

Some predominantly intellectual poets, the most prominent ones in that poetic genre among contemporary Serbian poets, have not completely severed their ties with lyrical poetry. Among these poets, the one who comes closest to lyrical poetry is Ivan Lalić, a meditative poet in the tradition of Rilke’s lyricism and Eliot’s rhetorical-imaginative poetry. Lalić’s condensed, primarily mythically and religiously orientated associativity is represented by harmonised, uneven verse, and intellectual control is reflected in the poet’s choice of prosaic words, which, against the backdrop of lyrical content, tone down the moments of emotional “sentimentality” on the part of the poet.

The potential of the intellect in post-World-War-Two Serbian poetry is most impressively illustrated by the poetry of Miodrag Pavlović. Starting from some emotions that are more existential than lyrical in character (fear, alienation, anxiety...), Pavlović’s imagination occasionally extends into entirely new regions. In these regions imagination orientates itself by means of symbols, often as striking as a flash of lightning. The pictorial quality of these symbols, however, is more often rationally composed than based on the emotional context. If, on the one hand, Pavlović’s imaginative breakthroughs are not always poetically justified, on the other, his imaginative power, which, along with occasional lyrical outbursts, keeps the elements of his world view together, cannot be denied.

As opposed to Pavlović’s imagination, the imagination of Vasko Popa very rarely loses touch with the lyrical. Regardless of whether it is connected, in a neo-impressionist manner, to the metaphorisation of space in Popa’s early collections, or, later on, in a neo-symbolist manner, to myth and cosmic space, this imagination is accompanied by emotions or suggests emotions itself. Lyrical emotions, which are occasionally tightly, even rigidly bounded by intellect, the way their spontaneity was bounded by the rational reconstruction of mythical patterns, still impose themselves as the cohesive power of the poet’s world view.

The poetry of Borislav Radović does not lack lyrical content either. This poet rather often develops lyrical topics connected with nature and the world of man. However, the power of his intellect in the main point of his poems, flawlessly executed as regards their language and composition, almost invariably belies their lyricism. Thus, by means of irony and the poet’s philosophy of futility, the poet’s sensitivity is negated as well, while outside this sensitivity new spaces for intellectual cognition open up. The temperament in the poetry of Adam Puslojić, bringing the surreal and grotesque closely together, often overshadows the intellectual concept. The neo-dadaist inspiration in the poetry of Raša Livada is similarly orientated.

The space between lyrical and rational-intellectual poetry in the period after the Second World War is filled by specific poetic patterns, which, being predominantly lyrical, at the same time testify to the inevitable contact between emotions and reason in a poetic creative act. The poetic creations of Matija Bećković occupy a special place in this area; outside the established poetic movements, Bećković extended the lyrical thread of Njegoš’s “folksiness” and the epic decasyllabic verse. Bećković’s lyrical rhetoric, contrary to the preceding epic rhetoric, does not insist on the power of event but on the impressiveness of experience. This rhetoric follows the sort of lyrical imagination connected to children’s naive imagination and the imagination of lyrical heroes, who suffer and get carried away dreaming of heroic deeds, but who always preach a higher sort of ethics. Bećković’s humour speaks on behalf of the Dinaric (a mountainous region in the western part of former Yugoslavia, translator’s note) mentality, but is at the same time directed against this mentality. However, down to the last touches of irony and sarcasm, this humour does not lose its lyrical character.

The poetry of Dobroslav Smiljanić and Božidar Milidragović also seeks harmony in the sphere of lyrical-intellectual inspiration. In the case of the former, the intellect is in evidence in all the phases of the poetic experience, whereas, in the case of the latter, the intellect primarily determines the form, condensing, to the point of ellipticalness, the poetic statements beneath which “flows” the lyrical subject-matter. The poetry of Milutin Petrović is characterised by a confessional tone on the part of the poetic subject suffering the consequences of the existential drama with elements of alienation, which deforms man’s physical and psychological being. The potential lyricism of that tone and the lyricism of image are constantly controlled by means of rational use of language. Jovan Zivlak manages to combine an almost neo-romanticist pastoral ideality of landscape with urban landscape, subjecting it to intellectual irony without destroying its lyrical originality.

The neo-avant-garde tendencies in Serbian poetry after the Second World War are most in evidence in the signalist poetry of Miroljub Todorović. This poetry, on the one hand, significantly expanded the cognitional boundaries and enriched the genre profile of contemporary Serbian poetry; on the other, in the early phase of Todorović’s work there is a lyrical core of singing about matter which expanded the boundaries of cosmic inspiration in modern Serbian lyrical poetry.

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Finally, let us try to answer a question that anthologists often get asked: do they compile anthologies of poets or anthologies of poems? Pointing out that these two kinds of anthology are inevitably linked, our answer would be that poems take precedence over poets. We say this from an aesthetic point of view: in accordance with the phenomenological aesthetics, a poem is a phenomenon, an aesthetic phenomenon, existing in one’s consciousness and, for the most part, concretised, together with other poems, in the form of an art object – a book. It is art, which remains, whereas a poet is life, which passes. If the poet’s state of mind at certain moments is essential, then these moments are the true origin of the poem in question. They will produce timeless, ideal poems only if they are freed from biographical and psychological contingencies. In the nature of things, such privileged moments are rare, so that the number of good poems, or those ranking among the best, must of necessity be small. And in the poetry of those poets who are not first-rate sometimes there are only a few of them, just one, or even none. For this anthology we have chosen the best among the good poems of prominent poets, and just one, the best one, in the case of lesser poets, irrespective of what their place in our national lyrical poetry may turn out to be in the final analysis. Let us point out again that the basic criterion of this selection was the lyrical as an aesthetic category, in its ideality, its contacts with other spiritual and worldly spheres, and its being determined by the achievements of lyrical poetic production pertaining to a specific period of time – modern Serbian lyrical poetry.

Translated from the Serbian by Novica Petrović