The portrait of an artist as a young man: early poetry of Jovan Dučić and Miloš Crnjanski

Abstract

The paper looks at the origin of the identical motives in the poems "At Sea" by Jovan Dučić and "Destiny" by Miloš Crnjanski. A dominant poetic image of a ship carried and broken by waves on a rough sea is a product of the poets' youthful phase and demonstrates the evolution of their poetic systems. Resorting to a traditional topos is interpreted as a consequence of literary, historical, and poetic turmoil of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but also as a consequence of an imanent poetic development, i.e. the phenomenon which Mario Praz calls "the education of sensibility". Given that these two poets are canonical writers, and constitute an indespensable part of all primary and high school textbooks, our wish is to show the path of their poetic maturation.