Vojislav Ilić

Who was Vojislav Ilić?

Vojislav Ilić was a 19th-century Serbian poet of finely chiselled verse, son of the Romanticist playwright and poet Jovan Ilić.

Vojislav failed to complete his college education and was forced to take various clerical positions of minor importance. Living for the most part in penury, he wrote poetry extensively and soon became the leading Serbian poet in the last decades of the nineteenth century. As so many Serbian artists of that era, he died young, of consumption, in 1894.

His poetry exemplifies a classic example of modern Serbian language and features the standard Decadent motifs of the epoch: cruel nature, and times of Elagabalus.