The Meaning of Writing Modern Poetry in a/the New Century

Abstract

The paper deals with the sense of writing poetry as a form of text immanence that is antinomous to the contemporary age, which is also an alternative system of thought, of transformation, of imitation and of critical redefinition of the reality of that contemporary age. At the same time, poetry is a neglected, peripheral literary genre, but also a hyperbolized fictional form that opens the way to an alternative victory of opinions and feelings. Essayistic in structure, the paper discusses several poems and the poetics of three 20th century Serbian and Yugoslav Modernists (Kosovel, Dis, Crnjanski), in order to show, on the basis of their developing and differentiated poetic self-consciousness, what sense the writing of poetry might have in the 21st century. In these instances of poetics, paradigmatic of poetic self-consciousness in general, not all the possibilities of the sense of creativity and action have been exhausted, nor the poetic solutions leading to it.