Smrću protiv smrti

The new generation of poets, which emerged in the second half of the 1950s, came to the prepared field and already at the very beginning showed a number of advantages that enabled them to quickly break into literature: considerable literary culture, knowledge of foreign languages ​​and world poetry, well-groomed expression , mastery of different poetic techniques, premature maturity.

Several orientations appear in this generation. The most expressive is non-symbolic. The main poet of this generation, Branko Miljković (1934–1961), belongs to it. He ended his own life at the age of twenty-seven, and with that act he also marked his poetry, which from the beginning was preoccupied with the motif of death.

He left behind the collections Uzalud je budim (1957), Origin of Hope and Fire and Nothing (both 1960), and a book of patriotic poems Death against Death (1959), which he wrote together with the Montenegrin poet Blažo Šćepanović (1934–1966). He also wrote essays and reviews, translated poetry from Russian and French. Miljković is an intellectual poet, convinced that a poem is an expression of the pathos of the mind, not the heart, that it is reached with the mind' and that it expresses "states of mind" and not mental moods.

A philosopher by training, he believed that philosophical systems could be sung. That's why he returned to the first Greek philosophers, especially Heraclitus, connecting their teaching about the primordial elements with the modern philosophy of being. In his poetic expression, he strove to combine modern research with classical requirements, he advocated perfection as the greatest ideal of a poem, he believed that "there is no great poetry without a strict and definite form".

Blažo Šćepanović (Bijelo Polje, April 7, 1934 – Struga, August 26, 1966) was a Montenegrin and Yugoslav poet. He is best known for the collection of poems "Death Against Death" which he wrote together with the Serbian poet Branko Miljković.

Blažo Šćepanović was born in 1934 in the Bjelopolje village of Livadice. He graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade. He worked in the Cultural and Educational Council of the SFRY. He died at the very beginning of his poetic career, but he managed to leave behind several collections of poetry. Together with the poet Lazar Vučković, he drowned in Lake Ohrid during his stay at the Struga Poetry Evenings, one of the most significant cultural events in the former Yugoslavia.