Musa Ćazim Ćatić


Musa Ćazim Ćatić was a Bosnian poet of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Renaissance at the turn of the 20th century.

Life

He is currently featured on the 50 convertible mark banknote of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Poetic style and influence

Esoteric

Ćatić was a poet by vocation and emotional structure who poetically experienced and imaginatively sublimated everything he came into contact with. Ćatić's poetry was life, the meaning of existence, the atmosphere of reality, and the medium in which his spirit ranged.

Mystic

The poetic theme of Ćatić is situated, mainly, between two poles: eroticism by instinct and mysticism by spiritual endeavor, respectively. The combination of these motives sometimes occurred with a certain sense of spiritual distress, while sometimes sublimated in the form of sin, life and repentance as visioned by Epicurus and Khayyám. Mysticism though never separates Ćatić from reality and life; his mysticism, which draws on that of Turkish and Persian poets, rejects the pessimistic escapism of the spirit, similar to Baudelaire on whom Ćatić likewise draws.

Impact

Ćatić began in the style of his predecessor Safvet-beg Bašagić, standardized, with conventional instruments of versification and metrics, and a limited fund of metaphors from female folk songs and Eastern poetic symbols. But he soon made ground in the limited and underdeveloped poetic heritage surrounding him, spurring a small school of literary followers who would represent the second phase in the development of modern Bosnian poetry.

Works