A view of the oral poetry of Prusac based on new material

Abstract

This paper considers the poetic and folkloristic features of oral poems recorded in the latest ethnology and folklore studies of the Prusac area. The poetry consists of a few love poems and family, wedding, humorous and religious poems, but mainly of short, usually decasyllabic lyric couplets, known in the literature as “bećarac.” This paper also considers three fragments belonging to certain lyric narrative poems, and one ballad. The classification of the poems is based on the poetic features (principally their themes and motifs) of the recorded material.