Branko Miljković’s Early Poetry: The Miljković (Do Not) Know

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to identify the roots of Miljković’s poetical ideas and to outline the poetic development in his early poetry, the one which had not been published during the author’s lifetime but which became available to the broad spectrum of readers after the publication of the second volume of “The Collected Works, Poems II“. A number of those poems was found within the letters he had been writing as a fifteen-year-old boy to Ljiljana Ilić, the girl he had a great affection for, and these belong to the corpus of love, Petrarchan and Anti-Petrarchan lyric. By analysing and interpreting the early poems, we confirm the thesis that the poet in question is a man of great erudition, a remarkable connoisseur of literature, foreign languages, mythology and philosophy, even in his high-school years, that is, the poet who used literature as a source of inspiration for his poetry. Here we also find the roots of Miljković’s neo-symbolist poetics of dream and oblivion. We recognize the features of the specific use of symbols, metaphors and paradoxes in the construction of poetic images, but also his favouring permanent poetic forms such as the sonnet. It is evident that in these poems we can recognize the latter poet of Orpheus syndrome, according to which Miljković would be remembered in the history of 20th-century Serbian poetry.