Lyrical Poetry of Nikola Milićević – Opus and Microstructures

Abstract

This article aims to present and interpret eight complete collections of lyrical poetry by Nikola Milićević (1922 – 1999), a Croatian poet who lived and worked in the twentieth century, and was also too a prose writer, essayist, translator, anthologist and scientist, one of the editors Krugovi, a magazine that created a generation of poets called ’krugovaši’.Literary criticism unfairly regarded Milićević „as traditionalist“ because he wrote sonnets and decimes and poems with solid, connected verses, and numerous microstructures remained almost unnoticed: poetic forms, diverse stanzas and strophoids, scattered verses arranged in unpredictable forms of weakened syllabicity and without a rhyme.

All language choices are in the function of creating a diverse rhythm. Poetic effects are the result of metaphors to which verbs have been added, of dynamics that refined their metonymic layer. A smaller part of the poems are examples of spoken poetry close to poems in prose, that is, rhythmic prose. Milićević’s poetry emerges from deep humanity and modern sensibility, it is meditative and above all thought, without the basis of learned theories. In the interpretation of the semantic layers of the Song of the Old Lady, we applied a survey of girls and women using posts on Facebook.We sorted, processed, interpreted and published some of their views, attitudes and opinions.