Petar II Petrovic Njegos stands in Serbian literature rather as William Shakespeare does in English. If Shakespeare developed the English blank verse (iambic pentameter with no end rhyme) to its capacity, so did Njegos for the Serbian unrhymed trochaic pentameter. Njegos grew up with the trochaic line of the folk epic that Vuk Karadzic had popularized in his collections as the natural line of the Serbian language, and he developed it into an artistic expression that could not be carried further, only imitated and parodied. In this sense Njegos came close to what T. S. Eliot defined as a "classic." After Njegos, Serbian poetry gradually moved away from the folk decasyllabic line (the deseterac), for he had taken it to its maximum of expression.

Born Rade Tomov in the Montenegrin Njegus tribe, who lived near and below the mountain plain of Cetinje, Njegos belonged to a small nation...