In the first part of the text, we analyze the genre of biography. Our criticism of biography branches out into two directions: first, we argue that biography no longer reflects the connec- tion between the author’s biographical data and his/her work, which impacts the gradual sep- aration of biographical research from hermeneutics. As a result, this opens the possibility that in the future, a literary text can be neglected as the object of research. Biographical research could then shift its focus from the figure of an aesthetically relevant author to the figure of the author as a representative of a specific group. The second direction of our criticism deals with the fact that the biography genre deems all biographical data equally valuable. In order to solve both of the above-listed problems of writing biographies, we offer the genre of a life story in the text as a supplement to the genre of biography. A life story establishes a hierarchy of life experiences in order to determine which of these experiences have the status of meta-experi- ences which, further on, impact the author’s entire life, as well as his/her poetics. The second part of the text exemplifies the difference between biography and life story in Crnjanski, by relating the poetics of his poetry collection Lirika Itake [Lyrics of Ithaca] to his life story and the meta-experience of his father’s death.