The poetry of Silvije Strahimir Kranjcevic spans the turn of the twentieth century: his first volume of poems, Bugarkinja (Keening), appeared in 1885, and his last, Pjesme (Poems), shortly after his death in 1908. Never fully emancipated from the Romantic and realist postulates of his predecessors, he built on the lyrics of patriotism and love by Petar Preradovic, August Senoa, and August Harambasic before him, yet the new depths he brought to his verse laid the way for the Croatian Moderna (modernism), which soon found its voice in the years before World War I.

Pain is the single strongest emotion in Kranjcevic's poetry. Though he wrote occasional lyric love poems, his finest poems breathe with his pain. The sincerity of his suffering and the profundity of his anguish for the fate of his community, for his native Croatia, and for humanity are the greatest gifts his verse brought to Croatian...