He was the eldest child of wine merchants, Mate and Tomica, from the Poljica region in Dalmatia. In Trieste his first three years of schooling were in an Italian school, while he was also studying the Croatian and the Slovenian languages at the local South Slavic Hall. In 1916, during World War I, when his father fled from the Austrian front, he repeated the third year, in a German school, and then the fourth year in Zenica. In 1918, back in Trieste, he studied the first half of the school year in a naval high school; the second half he finished at a school in Susak. In the fall of 1919 Ivanisevic enrolled in a classical gymnasium in Split. By then his education was already firmly rooted in a multilingual experience.
In Split in 1925, he published his first poems in Hrvatska sloga (Croatian Unity). The following year he graduated from high school and attended the University of Belgrade, the only university that offered studies in comparative literature. There he also began to develop an interest in theater. Later that year he visited Paris, where he was introduced to the major literary and artistic trends of the time.
