The First World War and Kosovel
Slovene poetry found a place in the European avant garde of the 1920s with the work of Anton Podbevšek () and Srečko Kosovel (), as well as contributing to the post-First World War ultra-modernist movement. Srečko Kosovel, a Slovene poetic icon, was seen as the 'Slovene Rimbaud' during the last four years of his life. His opus consisted of more than 1,000 poems left in manuscript form, together with a few hundred prose works, primarily lyrical prose and sketches, literary criticism, essays on cultural problems, notes, diaries and letters. After his death, Kosovel was discovered and rediscovered several times: in 1927 (Poems - 60 poems), in 1931 (Selected Poems), in 1946 (Collected Works - the first book) and in 1964 (Integrali, ‘Integrals’). The publication of the latter edition proved to be one of the most exciting literary events of the 1960s, as a group of young Slovene poets discovered in Kosovel their contemporary, the founder of their poetics, and a missing part of Slovene literary history. In 2004 an English translation of Integrali entitled ‘Man in a Magic Square’ was published to commemorate the centenary of his birth. Kosovel is an Impressionist when he writes about the Slovene Karst and the fate of Slovenes threatened by foreign rule, and he is an Expressionist when he proclaims the destruction, antagonisms and cataclysm of Europe. His poetry changes from a silent lyric longing for the past into a loud, presumptuous, offensive work full of linguistic innovation and experimentation.
