Love inside the walls of conformity

Should poetry and art be confined by a firm set of rules? Or should it be left to follow whatever one’s heart desires? It’s an age-old question, a standard that changes with each new movement. Creating new ones and forcing the rest to abide by them, which leads to a new group of artists (poets in this matter) breaking the rules and crafting something different.

Serbian literature is, to say the least, a mess. The artistic movements don’t align with the rest of Europe due to the Ottoman occupation that lasted for numerous centuries; movements such as baroque, classicism and renaissance were never present. This by no means implies that there were no creations during that time, only that they aren’t so easily positioned within the rest of the European literary flow.

After gaining independence (Congress of Berlin, 1878) the country begins to move forward with the rest of Europe. Then comes modernism and soon enough a need to make a concrete literary canon of what poems should be remembered and which ones should be discarded and forever pushed away.

So “Anthology of Modern Serbian Lyric” is born.

Published in 1911 and written by literary critic Bogdan Popović, it is the first attempt to set standards and rules by which a poet should abide by for their poem to be considered art. In the prologue he states that a good poem needs to: have emotion, has to be clear (in its message) and has to be aesthetically pleasing (in its composition) through the entire length. By these firm rules, some writers who are considered classics do not appear in the anthology due to Popović thinking their material is crude or improper.

In the same year, critic Jovan Skerlić, publishes “Fake modernism in Serbian literature” where he harshly criticises (even insults) two important poets, Vladimir Petković Dis and Sima Pandurović. He claims they’re brash, decadent liars. He goes as far as calling Dis Satan. It is quite a fiery essay.

Most importantly, he judges the two for going against the rules. For daring to write about the unwritable and presenting life in a different light. Saying how they don’t actually understand what they are writing about. That they do not feel what their poems tell.

In short, he calls them poseurs for not abiding by the made-up rules.

Love is a common topic throughout art. Not at all surprising, considering that the emotion is ingrained in our very being.

Now, what if instead of a wonderful confession or natural description that talk of love through metaphors, we are put into the shoes of a couple in a mental hospital? Who walk through the garden, oblivious to the outside world watching them, judging and scoffing at their happiness, as if it’s a sin?

That is the theme of ‘Celebration’ (Serbian: ‘Svetkovina’) by Sima Pandurović.

The very title, celebration, hints at its controversial theme. The couple is described as out of their minds, celebrating their detachment from the world and sinking into the claws of their own supposed delusions. On the other hand, there is the rational world, observing, not understanding how two lost minds could possibly find happiness. By the end of the poem, the couple continues walking blissfully as the world sheds a tear, realising that the bliss the couple feels is far from their reach.

To understand why the outside world, in better words, society, can’t experience or begin to comprehend their bond, we must understand how the material world affects our ideas and expectations of love.

In the hospital, the subject experiences full spiritual freedom. It is described that the judgment and hardships of society are what brought them there.