Christian inspiration in contemporary Serbian poetry

Abstract

The subject of our research in this paper are aspects of religious spirituality in contemporary Serbian poetry. First, we give an overview of poetic, ideological and cultural characteristics of poetic production in the last three decades, with certain value categorizations. We then direct our attention to the individual poetics of poets born in the seventies and eighties, whose poetry has a proven presence of Christian inspiration. Our goal is to establish a literary-historical and culturally distinct poetic flow and situate it within the History of Modern and Contemporary Serbian literature, predominantly secular. The focus of our analysis is not exclusively quotes, narratives or motifs from the Bible and patristic literature. We examine how Christian (Serbian-Byzantine and Western-Christian) spirituality participates in the formation of an individual poetic view of the world, as well as poetic spirituality that manifests itself through poetic images, expressions and figures. We are interested in the work of the religious consciousness of our poets in shaping their artistic, moral and value attitudes towards the phenomena of our epoch, but also towards the culture to which they belong. Therefore, we analyse the cultural models that these poets embrace in their poetry, as well as the humanistic messages that they place within their immanent poetics. We come to the conclusion that male and female poets, with their poetic and spiritual commitment, have taken the risk of deciding to give up poetry as a form of social engagement, aware in advance of the burden of the alternative and the minority.