TRACES OF ZBIGNIEW HERBERT IN CROATIAN POETRY

The author conteds that there are two ways of considering the presence of Zginiew Herbert's art in twentieth-century Croatian poetry; the first is an attempt to describe the poet's poetics, as was done by the pre-eminent Croatian scholar of Polish culture Zdravko Malic, who has in his other capacity as a poet coopted some aspects of Herbert's art. The second is to explore poetic strategies of poets that belong to the most significant literary tendencies from the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties gathered around the journals "Krugovi" and "Razlog" given that they were informed by similar existential and ideological circumstances. The authors intend to show that the poetry of the leading Croatian poets of the time-Slavko Mihalic, Vlado Gotovac and Dubravko Horvatic-incorporates distinct elements of Herbert's poetics that simultaneously led to the formation of similar poetic strategies. It is in the mirror of Croatian poetry that Herbert functions as a specific marker of the utopia of poetic freedom and of tragic existentialist consciousness.