Laza Kostic’s Santa Maria della Salute in the poetic scope of Branko Miljkovic and Borislav Radovic

Abstract

The poetry of Laza Kostic left a strong impression on several Serbian interwar modernists, but it was in the years after the Second World War that Kostic?s role in the forming of modern poetic expression became completely clear to poets and commentators. Various aspects of the reception of Kostic?s poetry, especially of his poem Santa Maria della Salute, in Serbian interwar and post-war literary-critical thought have been largely explored. In this paper, I focus on the way in which members of the second generation of post-war modernists reacted to Kostic?s late poem in their verses. In the poem Laza Kostic [Laza Kostic] from the cycle Seven Dead Poets [Sedam mrtvih pesnika], which was written in 1956, Branko Miljkovic emphasized the autopoetic dimension of Santa Maria della Salute. In the poem Before the Pharmacy of Our Lady of the Sea [Pred lekarnicom u Gospe od mora], which was published in Poems 1971-1982 [Pesme 1971-1982], Borislav Radovic elaborated on ecological problems raised in Kostic?s late poem.