Chilhood in Lyric

Through the examples of texts of modern Croatian poets (from Šimić and Tadijanović, Vesna Parun and Kaštelan, to Šoljan and Ivančan) the author shows how childhood is portrayed in lyrical poetry asking why this topic is sometimes emphasised and at other times marginalized by different poetics. He concludes that the predisposition for the appearance of this motif lies in the understanding that the human existence is inconsistent; therefore, person changes in different periods of his/her life. Those poetics that insist on the intuitive recognition focus readily on childhood, unlike those that stress childhood’s rational dimension. This paper shows various stages of the topic of childhood as appropriated by different generations of the 20th century Croatian poets