Srečko Kosovel () (18 March 1904 – 26 May 1926) was a Slovenian poet, now considered one of central Europe's major modernist poets. He was labeled an impressionistic poet of his native Karst region, a political poet resisting forced Italianization of the Slovene areas annexed by Italy, an expressionist, a dadaist, a satirist, and as a voice of international socialism, using avant-garde constructivist forms. He is now considered a Slovenian poetic icon. Most of Kosovel's works were published almost four decades after his early death at 22. In his homeland, Kosovel entered the 20th-century Slovene literary canon as a poet who produced an impressive body of work of more than 1000 drafts, among them 500 complete poems, with a quality regarded as unusually high for his age. Life Srečko Kosovel was born as the youngest of five children to father Anton Kosovel, a Slovene teacher, who was not allowed to continue teaching in the Slovene language after the Austrian Littoral was annexed by Italy with the Treaty of Rapallo, 1920, and mother Katarina (née Streš) who was 40 years old at the time of his birth and nurtured the artistic talents of their children. Kosovel's sister played the piano and one of his brothers was an aspiring writer. Born in Sežana, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Kosovel lived in the nearby village of Tomaj until 1924. Before the annexation of his native Karst region by Italy, he familiarized himself with works of Slovene culture in general, especially Slovene literature, as well as drama at the Slovene theatre in Trieste, housed in the Trieste National Hall, the cultural center of Slovenes in Trieste. Kosovel has been compared to Rimbaud, sharing the young age at which they were exposed to human suffering during war. The Battles of the Isonzo—one of the worst engagements of the First World War, began when Kosovel was 12 and officially ended when he was 17—were near Kosovel's native village, and Rimbaud's native village was near the battles of the Franco-Prussian War. Kosovel had regular contacts with wounded soldiers and saw corpses because the battlefield was only some 15 kilometers from his home, which had a traumatizing effect on him. His parents wanted him to be removed from the vicinity of the war, and so in 1916 both he and his sister moved to Ljubljana, where he stayed until his early death. With the Treaty of Rapallo