Serbian Traditional Oral Heritage

„Vuk Karadžić’s poetics refiects his active attitude to the whole national, social, moral and artistic apparatus of Serbian oral culture. He understood this apparatus thoroughly and presented it to the world in his own way. His poetics of tradition involves, above all, a language which represents ‘the sacred soul of the nation’, a language which writers and educators must take into account, as the people create and compose words for general use and to communicate ideas. This is the language of a ‘finished’ folk literature, which Karadžić takes as the basis of the literarv language, and which is the basis of contemporarv literary activity. But this poetics is built on a broad view of the life, customs, beliefs and history of the people vividly preserved in oral literature.“
Nada Milošević-Đorđević