As man and creator Matoš is preoccupied with the Croatian reality of his time, rooted in its tragics, fatefully tied by his personal calamity to the calamity of his country. The bleak reality of the time, the backwardness of national life, his individual destiny as an exile, all of this filled him with woeful lamentations and tragic moods, but with romantic-utopian dreams and hopes as well. All of this caused him to identify both with tradition and with the reality of contemporary life, with his country of birth and with Europe, to creatively voice himself through the unity of oppos tes given to and peculiarly his, to speak at the same time as a romantic and a realist a traditionalist and modernist, a Croat and a European who is aware that without a higher culture there i's no higher poetry. Matos’s literary work 'springs from a deep and passionate experience of national and personal destiny, of the Croatian and Balkan complex and the wider European pc] Itical and cultural context, so that his patriotic poetry is an organic extension of the world of thoughts, moods, motifs and images of his narrative and journalistic prose. All of this shows that Matos’s literary work is united and indivisible in all of its segments 'Organically complete, intimate in Matos’s fashion and connected both with regard to content and style. If the poet’s destiny and that of his country has made his patriotic poetry life-relevant and national, Matos’s knowledge of symbolism and his theory of correspondence, Matos’s symbolic experiencing of reality, have made his lyric patriotic expression artistically suggestive, intimate in Matos’s fashion and universally European. Owing to its Parnassian- -symbolic dimension it was novel and unique at the time of its appearance. Precisely because of his life’s destiny as an exile and loner and due to his European education, Matoš, in his patriotic poetry, gave a synthesis of the Croatian and French spirit. Through his complexity of experience and style, he creatively confirmed his principles of symbolism and artistry, his poetics of correspendence, mu- sio, the colours of vocals. He experienced the reality of Croatia in Barres’s framework of ideas but with his own nerves and temperament. In his motifs and moods he reamains deeply national, and in his attempts to employ the literary methods of the European fin de sifecle he confirms himself as an European.
