Nikola Šop ( 1904. – 1982.), a poet, story-teller, playwright and excellent translator from Latin, one of the most prominent personalities in the 20th century. Croatian literature. Although his literary works always kept abreast with his contemporaries, he cannot be strictly attached to any literary circle or trend. A connoisseur in the Classical Latin and European literature, himself a longer shying publicity, during the six decades of his poetic work progressing steadily without any dramatic changes, without any twist and turns, Šop managed to create an authentic and dynamic poetics.Born in the royal Bosnian town of Jajce to the family of a land surveyor, where he spent his early youth and the best years of his life. This formative period seems to have been crucial for the future poet. His later studies in Belgrade and the sojourn in Zagreb until his death, where a malady confined him to sick-bed for more than twenty years, did not leave such mark of his opus. It was childhood among the self-effacing and hard-working craftsmen and farmers, in a milieu of ancient folk traditions and simple patriarchal catholicism, in Jajce at the beginning of the 20th century overlooking the clear waters of the Pliva and Vrbas, amidst the fabulous landscapes, that would remain a permanent source of Šop’s poetic inspiration.Integrating his early experience into an idiosyncratic pastorale with the inherent supernatural and numinous, in his first collection of poems (Poems of a Pauper Son of St. Francis, Belgrade, 1925), Šop created a genuine, fully palpitating poetic world, which in his subsequent texts transcends into a dreamy vision of paradise lost. All his later poems, regardless of the form of expression or genre and the choice of imagery, would pursue these utopian horizons, building and comprehensively elaborating on that ontological pattern where the traditional European metaphoric thought and the mythology of the primeval rise and fall meet and intersect with the central Christian idea. This concept was already built and formed in his collection Jesus and My Shadow (Zagreb, 1934). In fifties and onwards, in his long cosmological poems, this concept quite transparently underlay his entire opus. And that is precisely how modern reviewers explain the powerful continuity and amazing endurability of his poetry.
