Summary
Rade Drainac: Selected Poems
Representative of bohemia and anarchic rebellion, wanderer and "genius rascal", Rade Drainac, is the dark prophet of Serbian poetry between the two wars. Although his poetic voice owes something to the experience of famous contemporaries - Rastko Petrović and Miloš Crnjanski - he is still remembered as a spontaneous poet, whose heart "beats eternally in protest".
The self-proclaimed hypnotist's lyrical fabric is woven into bold collisions of modernity and primitivism, cosmism and exoticism, and immersed in the matrix of life and the harsh reality of the urban landscape. This selection, derived from ten poetry collections and one poem, contains nocturnal meditations, lyrical miniatures, Ulysses' fantasies, descriptive and rhetorical bulletins of the mental state of the poet's personality, which flow into the bed of "one general cosmic river" with a recognizable ostentatious sentimentality.
The reader's odyssey begins with "Blue Laughter" (1920), early poems signed by the author under the name Radojko Jovanović and characterized by Dučić's Alexandrian, Platonic eroticism and existential anxiety before God. However, early creativity more likely indicates the moment of birth of a noisy avant-garde alter ego, which indulges in the rhythm of free verse, humorous irony, imaginary escapes, and whose sung poetic rhapsody transcends the text and pours into life. Encountering the energetic poems of the most mature collection "Robber or Poet" (1928), until the last lyrical cry from "Daha zemlje" (1940), readers will finally recognize the intimate biography of our greatest, "robber" in poetry.
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