Summary
Laza Kostić: Selected Poems
The wayward moonwalker, the handsome wanderer and the eccentric bard Lazo Kostić, representative in his loneliness among Serbian romantics, is a restorer of the poetic language and an unusual figure in Serbian literature. That arrogant and playful boy in language, who grew up in the courtyard of oral tradition, multiplying the beauties and follies of his poetic expression, managed to eradicate the shackles of local confinement for the unhindered enjoyment of the charms of European flowers. Gallant and brilliant in his outward civic presentation, inhibited and hidden behind rich metaphors, humor and fantasy, he still failed to hide the subtleties of the logic of the heart, those inner gestures that can be traced from the first poems to the last lyrical legacy that has largely outlived him.
This selection from Kostić's poetry, chronologically based, represents a distinctive woven fabric in which everything from lyrical youthful ecstasy, national romantic pathos, through biblical and ancient motifs to cosmic images and the transcendence of man's everyday life through dreams. The great baroque interweaving of tones and the merging of opposites into a unique whole are part of a solemn creative act that brought the poet closer to aesthetic harmony, and the dramatization of imagination, the authority of inspiration, linguistic improvisations, wordplay and coinage are only confirmation of the exceptionality of the poetic personality, which always gravitated towards the future with its attitude in poetry.
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