Alojz Gradnik and Prešeren

Abstract

The article shows that stereotypical findings on how an author is linked to or even dependent on tradition are too general to be scientifically acceptable. They need to be verified and re-formulated. One such example is the poet Alojz Gradnik (1882–1967); although he was strongly linked to the Slovene poetic tradition, he significantly diverged from it in at least two areas: in his erotic poetry and in his sonnet writing. As far as the first is concerned, he treated an untouched and extremely sensitive theme in Slovene poetry, intimate sexual relationships, and inaugurated a new type of eroticism, a kind of sensual love poetry. Gradnik’s output also was in radical contrast with poetic tradition, in contrast with the major Slovene poet France Prešeren (1800–1849), when writing in sonnet form. He was not building on a romantic or classically romantic tradition in order to develop it into a new model; instead, against the common practice, he changed the structure of the sonnet as a regular poetic form and even removed it from its genre, i.e. in terms of its having exclusively lyrical properties.