The changes brought about by romanticism in the understanding of literature do not mean only the end of the classicist period. By destroying normativity as a form of relationship to creativity, the romantics emphasized the principle: as many writers as many sources of rules. Hence, the way was opened to the predominance of another poetics, descriptive, which has remained dominant even in our time. One of the most important results that romanticism brought in the study of literature is the orientation towards the study of concrete literary phenomena. This orientation brings to the fore the possibilities of studying concrete phenomena offered by the disciplines of literary criticism and literary history. The paper presents romantic poetic attitudes and theoretical considerations of romanticism.
An overview of epochs and directions is not the history of literature, because history cannot be reduced to summary representations of periods and directions. The greatest writers, the creators of history, are above and beyond the directions and schools. Directions and schools appear and disappear legally, so they are imposed as a subject of literary-historical and theoretical study. The periodization system establishes a certain scientific orientation in a multitude of literary facts, past and present. The paper highlights the theoretical problem of periodization of literature, as a central problem of theoretical examinations of literary phenomena.
Laza Kostić, in the early seventies of the XIX century, opposed the utilitarianism of Nikolay Chernyshevsky and Svetozar Markovié, and advocated the idea of aestheticism in poetry and art. In his study about Jovan Jovanović Zmaj, Kostić had discovered two opposing processes in the poet, which he symbolically named the battle between the dragon and the nightingale. Kostić's conception about the origin of poetry is at the intersection of romanticist poetics about creation from divine inspiration, and a philosophical concept of the interference as a basic principle. The paper sheds light on the correspondence among the philosophical and literary views of Laza Kostić and his artistic work.
The youngest poet of Serbian neosymbolism, Branko Miljković, established his version of national poetic tradition according to the well known model of Eliot's principle and was also always ready to accept something new, modern, the most avant-garde. He argued for the perfection of form as one of important elements of the symbolist poetry within his own poetics as well as within texts related to poetry, while as a poet and translator he was oriented toward modern European poetry of the poet of symbolism with a special talent for patriotic poetry. Branko Miljković presents the poem itself as the subject of his poetry where the power of poetic word can be perceived. That structure considers the improvement of lines, the improvement of the expressive power of words as well as the improvement of language. The words are a powerful framework of world for Miljković. He strived for returning their depth and intensive meaning. Furthermore, he found creative energy of words, its resurrection in the revival of semantic, evocative and expressive effect. He looked for the value of poetic words primarily within their superiority. In Miljković's world of poetry the words invent, shape, they become the only confirmation of our world. He regarded his poetic opinion and the very act of poet's creation as a necessary condition of the real poetic creativity: the author identified himself with the very act of writing being completely left at the mercy of words. The art of dying for this world is the art of spiritual living. At the same time it is the effort that differentiates the place of death and the place of life: the poison and the cure. These tendencies provided the poet with intellectual dimension, confirmed not only the power of poetry but the power of poet as well.
The text from Laza Kostic's poem Santa Maria della Salute is everlasting and changeless but its context regarding the meaning and the poet's evaluation can be changed depending on paradigms that regulate the relationships between the author and the readers. Diary of Dreams that was kept in French by Laza Kostić, the facts from his life and work are interesting enough even for the psychoanalytic explications of the hidden levels of the poem's context. This work presents literary and theoretical revelation of Petar Milosavljević in a unique monograph The life of Laza Kostić's poem Santa Maria della Salute (1981) that corresponds to the Jungian deep psychological analysis of Ivan Nastović in the book The Anima of Laza Kostić (2004). On the basis of the external textual facts, Milosavljević's views concerning the role of a woman in Kostić's poem are formulated in the way that the love toward that young girl is consisted of the projection of Kostić's Anima - the young mother whom he lost too early, counterbalance and the addition of the mother whom he found in his own wife. Simultaneously, that girl in his poem, as well as in his life, has a role of the muse that inspires him, and the role of madonna, Beatrice, who will take him to another world where the differences of all times are silent. The fact is that the fairy is not only an object of love but also the centre by which the poet defined his answer to the world with which he was faced in his late years. Milosavljević's view corresponds with Nastović's deep psychological revealation of the poem Santa Maria della Salute. Nastović mentions Hegel's thought that the truth is a whole and that spiritual life is regarded as a dynamic whole that is consisted of the conscious and unconscious part of the character. In regard to the Jung's view 'the unconscious often knows more and better than the consciousness', the unconscious never lies in comparison with the consciousness. The dreams of Laza Kostić from his diary of dreams, in the book of Ivan Nastović, The Anima of Laza Kostić, are interpreted for the first time almost a century after they have been written. Psychological interpretation of Nastović provided for the more complete and versatile understanding of the character, the poem of Laza Kostić as well, his love toward Jelena Lenka Dunđerska and Julijana Palanačka, and the revealation of the poet's anima. Using the psychoanalytical interpretation of the poet's dreams Nastović revealed the additional point where in the author's opinion there is a longing not for his own but for the archetypical mother as a centre of his faith, and at the same time a centre of the newly found meaning of his life, that prepared him for death and rebirth. The tension of the unique and unrepeatable poem derives from the philosophical and aesthetic paradigm of Laza Kostić, from the idea of the crossing of life and death that is solved in the poem of heavenly dreams with life after death. After earthly death, the poet was welcomed to the eternal life. Dostoevsky says that there is no a man nor a nation without the brightest idea. And there is only one brighter idea on the Earth, the idea of the immortality of the human sole - all other 'brighter' ideas derive from this one. The man's treasure is not a destructible substance but a delicate, invisible spiritual beauty, the beauty of the soul that Laza Kostić considered and wrote about. That spiritual beauty is revealed and can be seen in the souls of the ones who pray in silence, in the pain that creates a pearl.
