Danojlić and Dučić – Some common traits of post-symbolist expression

Abstract

The paper opens with Danojlić’s critique of Dučić’s poetry from the cycle of Sunčane pesme (Sunny poems). In phrases such as ‘exact description’ and ‘a perfectly displayed extract of reality’, which Danojlić uses in his critique, lies the key to understanding the post-symbolist expression of both poets. In Dučić’s, as well as Danojlić’s, poems these extracts reflect the mystical unity of both the visible and invisible side of the world, but it is Danojlić who, in his collection named Čistine (Open spaces) of 1973 and in his later works, too, in a lyrical description, under close scrutiny, notices in them a chain of minute movements, sensory palpitation and micro-happenings. For that purpose, he deploys dated words, euphonic frictions, as well as elliptic syntax, in a lyrical report on the current changes in the field of description. He applies the strategy of minute description, naming everything that enriches the visible world which can be named. Along with the procedure of maximal concretization of description, Danojlić applies his own version of Baudelairean ‘wood of symbols’, the world seen as a book or a text, comprised of a multitude of natural particles around us.