Tudor Arghezi was a Romanian writer, social critic and political figure, who is widely considered one of his country's greatest poets. His writing career covered nearly 70 years, from his teenaged debut in the 1890s to his death in 1967. He was originally an affiliate of the Symbolist movement, being welcomed there as an outstanding poet. Though he discarded this association in favor of a more personal style, he remained spiritually attached to the masters of international Symbolism, including Charles Baudelaire. From 1910, Arghezi's social poetry and leftist journalism became widely read, allowing him to embark on a writing career. He only published his poetry as books when he was in his forties, becoming instantly famous. In his creation of new poetic forms, he also borrowed the conventions of Christian poetry to contextualize his own embrace of agnosticism and delving into heresy.
Well-liked for his bridging of modernist techniques and thematic traditionalism, Arghezi was also praised for his verbal inventiveness, within the confines of a classical prosody. He took pride in upgrading the lower-class register of speech, and also extensively used the Oltenian dialect, with which he identified culturally. He became reviled by some of his generation colleagues, especially those represented in conservative circles, for the extreme naturalism and grotesque expressionism found in his subsequent works. Arghezi was instead regarded as an ally by the interwar avant-garde, which he encouraged without ever joining. His poetry won over portions of the cultural establishment during the 1930s, and always had admirers among dissenting traditionalists; he was therefore recognized as a Romanian classic even during the late interwar and World War II. The period saw Arghezi branching out into new creative fields, evidencing his satisfaction with life as a family man, as with his noted contributions to children's literature. He is less celebrated as a novelist, since his work there was less rigorous, often creating prose poetry rather than full-fledged epics; in addition, his one work for the stage, which reflects his personal resentment of the medical profession, has divided critics.
In his sixties, Arghezi was marginalized by the fledgling communist regime, who found him incompatible with its own political and aesthetic guidelines. Banned by the official censors between 1947 and 1954, he wrote dissident poetry that he did not publish, and that he sometimes destroyed. His subsequent recovery saw him climbing into the communist literary pantheon; while he preserved his stylistic traits (only embracing socialist realism and full-on propaganda in his travel writing), his publicized contributions of that period are largely viewed as of comparatively inferior quality. He still maintained a large following among young authors, who found themselves inspired by his more consecrated works of earlier periods. He also continued to inspire new generations of writers after his death.
Poetry Stylistic origins Ion Nae Theodorescu, later known as Tudor Arghezi, wrote his first poems in 1894, when he was aged fourteen and enrolled at Cantemir School. As he later explained, he had only taken up this hobby on a dare, to compete with a more literary-inclined colleague.István Ferenczes, "Q.e.d.? Arghezi / Ergézi", in Vatra, Vol. XLV, Issues 528–529, March–April 2015, p. 46 He was pushed to read literature by two of his teachers, but was also interested in bohemianism, believing that such lifestyles came natural for professional journalists.Tămăian & Simion, p. 345 A year later, he had become an outside affiliate of the socialist movement, sending samples of poetry for publication in socialist newspapers,Tămăian & Simion, pp. 345–346 but possibly without yet sharing the political agenda: according to historian Andi Mihalache, Arghezi was mainly interested in networking with left-wing literary professionals, including Garabet Ibrăileanu.Mihalache, p. 635 His penetration into literary life was a shock, with Ibrăileanu puzzled as to whether his poems evidenced genius or merely insanity.Simion (1993), p. 142; Tămăian & Simion, p. 351
While being hailed as an outstanding talent even at that age, Arghezi viewed himself as an artisan of a laborious and torturous craft: from his time as a monk of the Romanian Orthodox Church (1900–1905), he gathered the metaphor of the narrow gate, and had imposed "strict canons" on his artistic output.Cioculescu (1966), p. 447 During his 1900s dispute with the more senior journalist George Panu, he defended classical and Parnassian constrains such as meter, and complained that prose had been allowed to invade poetry.Balotă, pp. 18–24 He once declared that the exercise of filling out empty sheets of papers left him feeling like a modern-day Job; the goal was a poetic religion, constructing what he called "iconostases of words".Simion (1993), pp. 144–146 In a 1928 article, Arghezi referred his poetic vocabulary as a "heated gurgling from beneath the mud that enslaves me".Pârvulescu, p. 13 Almost two decades later, he was asking his peers to pity him for his labor "on this estate of mine, where rarely do I get to dig into a stream of silver."Cioculescu (1966), p. 444 As scholar Eugen Simion notes, Arghezi resembled Paul Valéry in his quest for perfection, but, unlike Valéry's cerebral purism, his poetry had "the brutal colors of reality".Simion (1993), p. 144 In the 1920s, Mihai Ralea was the first critic to note that Arghezi could not contain his rage, that he had a "functional inability" when it came to producing calm and uninvolved rhetoric.Rotaru, pp. 400–401, 403–404 Similarly, Arghezian disciple Ion Caraion discusses Arghezi as a poet of "disquiet" rather than equilibrium, as located in his confession:
At Bilete de Papagal magazine, where he got closest to theorizing a poetic credo in the 1930s, Arghezi preached complete sincerity, advising his followers to distrust fame, convention, and especially formalism.Țepelea (2006), pp. 24–26 Scholar Nicolae Balotă regards his lyrical theorizing as revolving around the idea of a "fruit", of germination and fecundity within the writing process, as well as in the preferred imagery.Balotă, pp. 29–34, 48 Another fundamental myth of his poetry, aligning with his own self-presentation, was his belief in the "proud solitude" of a poet, with "an impressive number of metaphors" created for bringing this issue into focus—with fainter echoes of his "abysmal fear" in front of life's essences.Tămăian & Simion, pp. 359–360 Overall, the defrocked Arghezi identified as an agnostic; while stating his respect for authentic religiosity, he declarted his inability to take up Christian dogmas, or belief in general.Crohmălniceanu (1994), pp. 29, 31 In his implicit or explicit polemics with the Orthodox Church, he observed that atheism and dialectical materialism were preferable to the debased "idolatry" of average Christians, and seems to have expressed sympathy for heresies such as Arianism or Bogomilism.Rotaru, pp. 388–393
Arghezi's struggles with belief show up in a number of lyrical pieces that (various authors note) resemble Christian poetry without ever fully merging into it, since they describe God the Father as a frustratingly self-concealing deity; Duhovnicească ("Spiritual Confession") and various "Psalms" are widely hailed as masterpieces of this series, which also seeps into the cycle Flori de mucigai ("Mildew Flowers"), published in 1931.Rotaru, pp. 387–394; Tămăian & Simion, pp. 359–363 One such work reads:
Caraion observes however that Arghezi's "belief in poetry" was limited and circumstantial, since he regarded the craft itself as fundamentally mendacious, despite a poet's best intentions: "if poetry torments [Arghezi], it does so with no relief, and no cure".Caraion, p. lxviii Balotă further notes "his refusal to confess, and therefore to find a source for lyricism in a poet's subjectivity".Balotă, p. 29 In Caraion's reading, Arghezi's search for linguistic totality often meant playing with "facile" metaphors, with forms of "candor" and "trickery", through which he persuaded some of his readers that he too could be superficial and "ornamental".Caraion, pp. xxiv–xxv Meanwhile, his recurring attraction to the minute universe—that of small, humble creatures subject to a "progressive de-materialization"—drew comparisons Reiner Maria Rilke and his Duino Elegies.Caraion, pp. civ–cvix These generic traits led him to be shunned by hermetic poets such as Ion Barbu, who dismissed him as base,Balotă, pp. 71, 73, 75–76, 84; Caraion, pp. ix–x; Rotaru, pp. 463, 475. See also Cioculescu (1966), p. 448; Simion (1993), pp. 142–143 and Simion Stolnicu, who viewed him as "nebulous".Eugen Simion, "Fragmente critice. Memorialistică", in România Literară, Issue 29/1988, p. 10
Many readers have commented on Arghezi's seemingly unlimited poetic resources, and his eluding all definitions by embracing in turn all the manifestations of modernism, and remaining original, with the same core traits, throughout.Cioculescu (1966), pp. 436–441; Crohmălniceanu (1978), p. 236; Rotaru, pp. 749–750, 762–763; Tămăian & Simion, pp. 364–365 Scholar Miklós Szabolcsi rated him as a final exponent of the local Symbolist school, "reconsidered [by Arghezi] in a national optic."Miklós Szabolcsi, "L'«Avant-garde» littéraire et artistique comme phénomène international", in La Pensée. Revue du Rationalisme Moderne, Issue 142, December 1968, p. 106 His stylistic education, shaped by the contrasting influences of Mihai Eminescu and Alexandru Macedonski,Tămăian & Simion, pp. 350–352 was also directly based on Symbolism as an international phenomenon; at sixteen, he was borrowing from René Ghil, but also pushing in the first elements of his creative universe.Cioculescu (1966), p. 418 In the 1910s, while under employment with Seara daily, where (as Rotaru writes) he abandoned his "fatefully Macedonskian" side, he openly derided Romanian Symbolists, but not the Western masters.Rotaru, pp. 382–384 He was thereafter a posthumous disciple of Charles Baudelaire, particularly when it came to Baudelaire's "flowers of evil".Balotă, p. 30; Caraion, pp. xxxix, xliv–li; Crohmălniceanu (1978), pp. 236, 239–240; Mihalache, pp. 632, 636; Rotaru, pp. 397, 401, 753; Tămăian & Simion, pp. 351, 352, 353, 362 A brief, fully expressionist phase was also identifiable just before 1916—with expressionistic undertones, on a trajectory somewhat similar to Gottfried Benn's, still appearing over a decade later.Crohmălniceanu (1978), pp. 236–242 Literary critic Șerban Cioculescu writes that Arghezi's "poetry of disgust" hinged on his distressing experiences from all ranges of life—his time at Cernica Monastery, his detainment alongside the "fauna of prison" at Văcărești, and his time with the literary clubs. His lampoons grew into a poetic style:Nobody found richer ways of expression when it came to translating into words a material decomposition, a purulence, an abscess, an exfoliating dermatitis, done with such satanic glee as if a passionate clinician discussing "beautiful" chancres or tumors, fantastically rubescent, as in underwater flora and fauna.Cioculescu (1966), p. 419
Quasi-traditionalism