Jovan Ducic is considered by many specialists to be the best Serbian writer of lyric poetry. Almost single-handedly, he changed the tone and sensibility, the themes, the vocabulary, the style, the rhythm, and the form of Serbian poetry, brilliantly bringing it up to European standards. As no one before or after, Ducic succeeded in integrating pictorial and symbolic representations, words and sounds, versification and music, original visionlike intuitive analyses, and descriptions of nature, culture, and the human soul to such an unheard-of degree that it was easy, as well as pleasurable, for many lovers of poetry to learn his poems by heart. Together with Milan Rakic, another great Serbian poet and contemporary, Ducic brought the alexandrine (a twelve-syllable line) and the eleven-syllable line to near perfection. It has often been said that Ducic composed many more high-quality poems than any other Serbian poet. The originality and depth of...