Jovan Dučić

Jovan Dučić (Trebinje, 1871 or 1872 – Gary, Indiana, 1943) was a Serbian poet, diplomat and academic born in Ottoman-ruled Bosnia. He wrote in Serbian and is counted among the most influential Serbian lyric poets and modernists. His importance lies in how he renewed Serbian poetry with themes and techniques that had rarely appeared in it before.

His exact birth date is not reliably known, and the years 1871 and 1872 are the ones most often given. His father died in 1878 after being wounded in the Herzegovina Uprising. Dučić taught in Bijeljina and Mostar, where he helped found the magazine Zora with Svetozar Ćorović and Aleksa Šantić. After Austro-Hungarian authorities barred him from teaching in Serbian schools following a patriotic celebration, he went abroad to study. He earned a law degree from the University of Geneva and entered the Serbian diplomatic service in 1907.

For about thirty years he served in nine cities, including Istanbul, Sofia, Rome, Athens, Cairo, Madrid and Lisbon. His early verse owed much to Vojislav Ilić, but his travels and the Symbolist movement gave him a style of his own. He restricted himself to two metres of French origin, the dodecasyllable and the hendecasyllable, to concentrate on symbolic meaning. His main themes were love, God, death, the homeland, the landscapes of Herzegovina and the Adriatic, and poetry itself. He mixed everyday speech with unexpected images and used colour metaphorically.

After the German invasion of Yugoslavia he went into exile in the United States in 1941, where he led a organization representing the Serbian diaspora and protested the killing of Serbs by the Croatian Ustaše regime. He died in Gary in 1943. After the Second World War he was dropped from Yugoslav school anthologies, but his reputation was later restored. His remains were moved to Trebinje in 2000.