Literary work of Tudor Arghezi

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.