Rakitić wrote and had the following books of poetry published: Lights of Writings (1967), Raska Tunes (1968), The world is not our home (1970), Earth on the Tongue (1973), Poems of Tree and Fruit (1978), Craving for the South (1981), A Descendant (1982), Basic Land (1988), Deeds on Fire (1990), A Soul and a Sandbar (1994); his published books and essays are: From Ithaca to Illusion (1985), Forms and Meanings (1994); an anthology: Yugoslav Peoples' Poetry of Romanticism (1978); Selected Works in five volumes, Selected and New Poems (1998), Letters Made of Water (2000).

His lyrically-intimist, elegiac, reflexive and religious poetry tries to offer answers to eternal issues of life and death, to the position of an individual and historic, collective sufferings.

Under the communist regime, Slobodan Rakitić played an active role as a writer struggling for human rights and democratic freedoms.

[2] In 1990, he took part in founding the "Serbian Renewal Movement" (SPO), the largest opposition party at that time, led by Vuk Drašković.

He was the President of Serbian Renewal Movement parliamentary fraction in the Serbian Parliament during the first pluralist National Assembly (1991–1992), also the leader of the parliamentary fraction (1993–1994) of DEPOS - "Democratic Movement of Serbia" (a large union of major opposition parties and numerous individuals not belonging to any of the political parties).