Vladislav Petković Dis

Vladislav Petković Dis (Владислав Петковић Дис) was a Serbian poet, part of the impressionism movement in European poetry. He was born in 1880 in Zablac, near Čačak in Serbia and died in 1917 (on a boat on the Ionian Sea. He introduced irrational and subconscious images into Serbian lyric poetry. One of his most famous poems is "Perhaps She Sleeps" ("Možda spava"). During his lifetime he worked as a teacher and a war-front reporter during the Balkan Wars. During World War I he escaped to France. Near the end of World War I he traveled to Greece, but the ship he had boarded was intercepted by a German submarine and sunk. The manner in which he died earned him a reputation of a “cursed poet,” since one of his well-known poems is titled “The Drowned Souls” ("Utopljene duše").