In an age dominated by socialist realism, it was a radically innovative work that boldly broke with established norms and conventions. Although its significance is somewhat obscured by the intrinsic values of Popa's later works,
Kora merits an important place in literary history as a work that marked the advent of postwar modernism in Yugoslavia. All Popa's later collections met with a favorable if sometimes subdued critical response. With each new work, he surprised and at times perplexed critics and readers alike. Each collection lays out the terms of a new universe with ground rules to be mastered anew. This resistance to established practices is characteristic of Popa; he assiduously avoids the conventionalization of his own work.
Popa was born to a family of mixed Serbian and Romanian extraction on 29 June 1922 in Grebenac, a small Serbian village near the Yugoslav-Romanian border. The poet, who considered himself a Serb, lived in Belgrade most of his life and wrote his poetry exclusively in Serbo-Croatian. He attended elementary and secondary school in Vrsac, a town in Vojvodina located some thirty kilometers from his place of birth. In 1940 he moved to Belgrade to study Romance languages and literatures.
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